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

Setting up the Raspberry Pi camera

Before we can get into computer vision, we need to prepare the camera on your robot. There is hardware installation and software installation involved.

When we have completed this installation, our robot block diagram will look like Figure 13.1:

Figure 13.1 – Our robot block diagram with the camera added

Figure 13.1 continues the block diagrams we have shown throughout the book, with the camera's addition and its connection to the Raspberry Pi highlighted on the left.

We will first attach the camera to the pan-and-tilt assembly. We can then use a longer cable to wire the camera into the Pi. Let's start preparing the camera to be attached.

Attaching the camera to the pan-and-tilt mechanism

In Chapter 10, Using Python to Control Servo Motors, you added a pan-and-tilt mechanism to your robot. You will mount the camera onto the front plate of this mechanism. There are brackets and kits, but they...