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

Exploring the Raspberry Pi's capabilities

As we saw in Chapter 2, Exploring Robot Building Blocks – Code and Electronics, the controllers used for a robot can be one of the most critical choices you make. This will determine what kinds of inputs and outputs you have, what the power requirements of your electronics will be, what types of sensors you will be able to use, and what code you will run. Changing a controller could mean rewriting the code, redesigning where the controller would fit, and changing the power requirements.

The Raspberry Pi is a range of small computers designed for use in education. Having I/O pins for connecting it to custom hardware, while being a complete computer, makes it a favorite of makers (a term for people who like to make things for a hobby, like robots and gadgets). This is helped by the relatively cheap cost and small size of a microcontroller compared to standard computing devices. All Raspberry Pi models have abilities including attaching...