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

Summary

In this chapter, we put together a lot of what we learned in this book so far to create a Bluetooth-controlled, camera-equipped, line-following robot from scratch. This robot is an ideal starting point for you to explore the control of mobile robots and to try out different controller ideas. There are some straightforward ways to improve upon the simple line-following algorithm. For example, you can use the direction of the line vector to make line following more robust and allow your robot to go faster around the track. The Pixy camera can also detect intersections of lines and turn signs, and you can experiment with these features. How about using one of the controller buttons to let the robot turn around and continue to follow the line in the opposite direction? Or changing controller parameters on the fly and seeing the effects in real time, without having to re-upload the program? Or plotting the deviation from the line in the live plotter on the phone app?

You can...