Book Image

Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

The field of robotics is expanding, and this is the perfect time to learn how to create robots at home for different purposes. This book will help you take your first steps in planning, building, and programming a robot with Raspberry Pi Pico, an impressive controller bursting with I/O capabilities. After a quick tour of Pico, you’ll begin designing a robot chassis in 3D CAD. With easy-to-follow instructions, shopping lists, and plans, you’ll start building the robot. Further, you’ll add simple sensors and outputs to extend the robot, reinforce your design skills, and build your knowledge in programming with CircuitPython. You’ll also learn about interactions with electronics, standard robotics algorithms, and the discipline and process for building robots. Moving forward, you’ll learn how to add more complicated sensors and robotic behaviors, with increasing complexity levels, giving you hands-on experience. You’ll learn about Raspberry Pi Pico’s excellent features, such as PIO, adding capabilities such as avoiding walls, detecting movement, and compass headings. You’ll combine these with Bluetooth BLE for seeing sensor data and remotely controlling your robot with a smartphone. Finally, you’ll program the robot to find its location in an arena. By the end of this book, you’ll have built a robot at home, and be well equipped to build more with different levels of complexity.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics – Preparing for Robotics with Raspberry Pi Pico
7
Part 2: Interfacing Raspberry Pi Pico with Simple Sensors and Outputs
12
Part 3: Adding More Robotic Behaviors to Raspberry Pi Pico

Modeling the space

The aim of a Monte Carlo system is to model or simulate a space and a robot’s location. In this section, we will learn how code for the robot will represent this space. We will also look at how a computer can be used to visualize our robot’s guesses. Monte Carlo-based behavior code checks sensor readings frequently against the model of the space, so we should represent the space on the robot to optimize this.

The role of the computer and the robot in this are shown in the following diagram:

Figure 13.4 – Visualizing with the computer

Figure 13.4 shows an overview of this system’s display and control architecture. The behavior code runs on the robot. The computer displays the state of the robot code, along with start and stop controls. The arena and state of the system all belong to the robot.

Let’s look at how to represent the arena on the robot.

Representing the arena and robot position as numbers...