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

About encoders and odometry

Odometry is measuring how a position has changed over time. We can combine measuring and estimation to determine where you are on a route. An encoder is a sensor designed to measure distance traveled via wheel turns. They are like tachometers, but encoders measure position whereas tachometers measure only speed. Combined with time, they can make a speed measurement too.

Absolute and relative sensing

Sensors for a robot’s location come in two primary forms. They are as follows:

  • Absolute sensors encode a position to a repeatable position. They have a limited range or resolution, such as encoding a position along a known line. For example, GPS sensors have exact positioning with low resolution, suitable for meters but not millimeters.
  • Relative sensors tend to be cheaper. However, they produce a relative change in position, which needs to be combined with the previous state to get an absolute estimate – this means that errors...