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

Understanding how code can be broken or lost

Code and its close cousin, configuration, take time and hard work. Code needs configuration to run, such as Raspberry Pi OS configuration, extra software, and necessary data files. Both need research and learning and to be designed, made, tested, and debugged.

Many bad situations can lead to the loss of code. These have happened to me a week before taking robots to a show after weeks of work, and I learned the hard way to take this quite seriously. So, what can happen to your code?

SD card data loss and corruption

SD card corruption is when the data on the SD card used to hold your code, Raspberry Pi OS, and anything you've prepared on it gets broken. Files become unreadable, or the card becomes unusable. The information on the SD card can be permanently lost.

If a Raspberry Pi unexpectedly loses power, the SD card can be damaged, causing data loss. A hot Pi can slowly bake an SD card, damaging it. Visual processing on a...