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

Building a Self-Balancing, Radio-Controlled Telepresence Robot

This chapter is the final project of the book. We will build a self-balancing robot that you can combine with your smartphone or tablet to create a telepresence robot. There is no need for a telepresence robot to be self-balancing, but it is a really fun way to explore some interesting new concepts. This robot is based on the line-following robot that we built in the previous chapter, but we will make necessary hardware upgrades and add a few more exciting featwures to create an even more capable robot. We will also learn how to use sensor fusion for pitch estimation with an IMU sensor, how to estimate wheel velocity from position encoders, and discover some more interesting applications of CAD and 3D printing.

This example project is the most advanced in this book and gives you the opportunity to see a lot of interesting concepts come together. The chapter is packed with hands-on experiments, and is structured as follows...