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 motor controller board

The next important part you'll need is a motor controller. You cannot connect a Raspberry Pi directly to DC motors, as they require different voltages and high currents that would destroy GPIO pins. Motor controller boards can also add interfaces to other devices like sensors and other motor types.

It is a vital robot component that will guide many later decisions. Much like the motors, there are some trade-offs and considerations before buying one:

Figure 6.8 – A selection of motor control boards

Figure 6.8 shows a small sample group of motor controller boards. As we compare the requirements of our motor board, we refer to the boards pictured there as examples.

Integration level

Motor controllers may only control a motor (usually 2) like the L298N, containing the barest minimum to run this chip safely. They are not designed to sit on a Raspberry Pi and must be wired into the Pi's I/O output.

Controllers...