Book Image

Practical Arduino Robotics

By : Lukas Kaul
Book Image

Practical Arduino Robotics

By: Lukas Kaul

Overview of this book

Every robot needs a “brain,” and the Arduino platform provides an incredibly accessible way to bring your Arduino robot to life. Anyone can easily learn to build and program their own robots with Arduino for hobby and commercial uses, making Arduino-based robots the popular choice for school projects, college courses, and the rapid prototyping of industrial applications! Practical Arduino Robotics is a comprehensive guide that equips you with the necessary skills and techniques that can be applied to various projects and applications, from automating repetitive tasks in a laboratory to building engaging mobile robots. Building on basic knowledge of programming and electronics, this book teaches you how to choose the right components, such as Arduino boards, sensors, and motors, and write effective code for your robotics project, including the use of advanced third-party Arduino libraries and interfaces, such as Analog, SPI, I2C, PWM, and UART. You'll also learn different ways to command your robots wirelessly, such as over Wi-Fi. Finally, with basic to advanced project examples, this book illustrates how to build exciting autonomous robots like a self-balancing telepresence robot. By the end of this book, you'll be able to design and create your own custom robots for a wide variety of applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Selecting the Right Components for Your Robots
6
Part 2: Writing Effective and Reliable Robot Programs for Arduino
10
Part 3: Building the Hardware, Electronics, and UI of Your Robot
15
Part 4: Advanced Example Projects to Put Your Robotic Skills into Action

Controlling your robot with a hobby remote control

Hobby RCs have been in use for decades. Even though the underlying radio technology has changed a lot and modern hobby radio controls offer many advanced features compared to the early days of RC technology, the output signal produced by the receiver has remained remarkably simple. This makes them extremely easy to integrate into an Arduino robot.

A hobby RC system consists of a handheld transmitter with control inputs such as sticks, wheels, or buttons, and a receiver. Each manual input to the transmitter is transmitted wirelessly to the receiver and output by the receiver as a digital signal. Between 2 and 10 signals are common among standard systems. The different signals that can be transmitted are called channels. With a six-channel RC system, we can control six functions of our robot, for example, six joints of a robot arm.

Decoding the receiver output

While an RC transmitter can take on many forms, shapes, and sizes...