Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

We live in an age where the most complex or repetitive tasks are automated. Smart robots have the potential to revolutionize how we perform all kinds of tasks with high accuracy and efficiency. With this second edition of Learn Robotics Programming, you'll see how a combination of the Raspberry Pi and Python can be a great starting point for robot programming. The book starts by introducing you to the basic structure of a robot and shows you how to design, build, and program it. As you make your way through the book, you'll add different outputs and sensors, learn robot building skills, and write code to add autonomous behavior using sensors and a camera. You'll also be able to upgrade your robot with Wi-Fi connectivity to control it using a smartphone. Finally, you'll understand how you can apply the skills that you've learned to visualize, lay out, build, and code your future robot building projects. By the end of this book, you'll have built an interesting robot that can perform basic artificial intelligence operations and be well versed in programming robots and creating complex robotics projects using what you've learned.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics – Preparing for Robotics
7
Section 2: Building an Autonomous Robot – Connecting Sensors and Motors to a Raspberry Pi
15
Section 3: Hearing and Seeing – Giving a Robot Intelligent Sensors
21
Section 4: Taking Robotics Further

Attaching encoders to the robot

Our robot is now getting quite busy, and our Raspberry Pi is above the encoder's slots. Due to the slots being under the Raspberry Pi, we should wire them in a little before returning the Raspberry Pi. After bolting in the Raspberry Pi, we wire the encoders to its GPIO, as well as the power and ground.

Figure 11.5 shows what the robot block diagram looks like after attaching the encoders:

Figure 11.5 – Robot block diagram with encoders

This block diagram adds a left and right encoder, each with an arrow for the information flow connecting them to the Raspberry Pi. The highlighted elements are the new ones.

Before we start changing the robot and making it harder to see, we need to know the number of slots in the encoder wheel for later:

Figure 11.6 – Encoder wheel

My encoder wheels, shown in Figure 11.6, ended up having 20 slots. Ensure you use the number of spaces your...