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

Running background tasks when streaming

Our image service works but has a significant flaw. Currently it will wait between requests before taking each action, but what if we want our robot to be doing something? To do this, we need to be able to run a behavior in parallel with the server. That behavior and the server both need access to the image data.

We will approach this by making the Flask web app a secondary process, with the behavior as the primary process for the robot when it is running. Python has a handy tool for precisely this kind of structure, called multiprocessing. Find out more at https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html.

Communicating between multiple processes is tricky. If two processes try to access (read or write) the same data simultaneously, the results can be unpredictable and cause strange behavior. So, to save them trying to access data simultaneously, we will use the multiprocessing queue object. A queue allows one process to put data...