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 14: Line-Following with a Camera in Python

In the last chapter, we saw how to use a camera to follow and track objects. In this chapter, we will be extending the camera code to create line-sensing behavior.

We will look at where robots use line following and how it is useful. We will also learn about some of the different approaches taken to following paths in different robots, along with their trade-offs. You will see how to build a simple line-following track.

We will learn about some different algorithms to use and then choose a simple one. We will make a data flow diagram to see how it works, collect sample images to test it with, and then tune its performance based on the sample images. Along the way, we'll see more ways to approach computer vision and extract useful data from it.

We will enhance our PID code, build our line detection algorithm into robot driving behavior, and see the robot running with this. The chapter closes with ideas on how you can...