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

Combining sensors for orientation

We've seen how we combined the accelerometer and gyroscope to get smooth readings for pitch and roll. We can combine the sensors again to correctly orient and smooth the magnetometer readings too. This system allows us to approximate the absolute orientation of the robot.

Take a look at the following data flow to see what we are doing—it builds on the previous stages:

Figure 16.17 – Fusing all three sensors

Figure 16.17 starts on the left with data from our previous stages. We have the filtered pitch and roll in gray because it's also an output. There's the calibrated gyroscope yaw, delta time, and also the calibrated magnetometer as inputs. The filtered pitch and roll go through the tilt-compensate box, where we rotate the magnetometer vector. The magnetometer data then goes through an xy-to-polar box, using the atan2 function to get a heading.

Above this, the calibrated gyroscope yaw...