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

Finding more information on computer vision

We started looking at computer vision in Chapter 13, Robot Vision – Using a Pi Camera and OpenCV. We used OpenCV to track colored objects and faces but barely scratched the surface of computer vision.

Books

I recommend the book OpenCV with Python By Example, Prateek Joshi, Packt Publishing, if you wish to continue learning about OpenCV. This book uses computer vision to build augmented reality tools and to identify and track objects and takes you through different image transformations and checks, showing screenshots for each of them. It is also quite fun as it contains lots of hands-on code.

You can even extend computer vision further to 3D computer vision with the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor bar. Although they are no longer produced by Microsoft, they are extremely common and fairly cheap on eBay. Note that there is a modern Azure Connect device you can use for this, but at the time of writing, this is 20 times the price! The...