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

Choosing a controller — how we are going to drive the robot, and why

We want to be able to control our robot with something that is handheld and wireless. Trailing a wire to our robot would make little sense. Having seen how our robot drives in Chapter 7, Drive and Turn – Moving Motors with Python, we will want a control system that directly affects the wheels.

One way to do this would be to use a Bluetooth joypad. There are a large number of these on the market, which may require specialist drivers to read. Bluetooth has a habit of dropping pairings at inopportune times.

Some joypads use a custom wireless dongle; these are far more reliable than Bluetooth but have a dongle that doesn't fit very nicely on the robot.

However, you already have a handheld device in your pocket: your phone. It has a touchscreen, capable of reading finger movements. With a bit of the right code, you can display the video between controller bars, creating a kind of robotic periscope...