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

Chapter 12: IMU Programming with Python

Modern robots need to know their position relative to the world. In Chapter 11, Programming Encoders with Python, we looked at how encoders can get an idea of how much the robot has moved or turned. However, this turning was relative to where the robot was and had no absolute reference. Wheel slipping could lead to false readings. In this chapter, you will see more ways the robot can read changes in its position and measure its movements.

In principle, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) can give absolute position measurements and not slip. In practice, they are complicated. This chapter is a small practical tour of adding an IMU to your robot. I will introduce the components of an IMU in this chapter. You will also learn how to solder in order to add headers to a breakout, a skill that opens up a world of additional robot parts.

We'll write some code to try the various functions and see the kind of output the sensors provides. We will...