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

Exercises

Try these exercises to get more out of this chapter and expand your experience:

  • Try installing some other Mycroft skills from the Mycroft site and playing with them. Hint: say Hey Mycroft, install pokemon.
  • The robot mode system has a flaw; it assumes that a process you've asked to stop does stop. Should it wait and check the return code to see if it has stopped?
  • An alternative way to implement the robot modes might be to update all the behaviors to exit cleanly so you could import them instead of running in subprocesses. How tricky would this be?
  • While testing the interactions, did you find the vocabulary wanting? Perhaps extend it with phrases you might find more natural to start the different behaviors. Similarly, you could make dialogs more interesting too.
  • Add more intents to the skill, for example, wall avoiding. You could add a stop intent, although the response time may make this less than ideal.
  • Could the RGB LEDs on the ReSpeaker...