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

Connecting to your robot over Wi-Fi

Lastly, we will briefly look at the possibility of connecting to your robot over Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is an immensely powerful and versatile wireless interface with many potential applications. The way you would most commonly use it on your robot is by running a web server on your Arduino. This server serves up a web interface that you can connect to from any browser over Wi-Fi. It can display live sensor data (even camera data) or expose control interfaces. Wi-Fi is rarely the best choice of wireless interface for your robot due to its complexity. And while there are many great tools available to make using Wi-Fi easy, it is still a lot more complicated to use than any of the other interfaces we discussed so far in this chapter. However, connecting your robot to the internet is great when you need to access it from anywhere in the world – for example, if you build a home security robot that you want to control over the internet when you are away...