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

Summary

In this chapter, you've now learned how to choose the parts for a robot by reasoning and making some important design decisions. You used a simple tool to test fit these parts and see what works before buying anything. Finally, you bought the parts and built your starting robot platform.

By considering the trade-offs and test fitting again, you have gained skills for planning any hardware project, including finding dimensions on the datasheets/vendor websites, making a simple test-fit sketch, and considering how the parts will interact together. You've learned how the size of a robot affects motor and controller decisions. You've seen how to make parts easy to remove using hook and loop tape and considered other options for this.

By hooking up independent power, and connecting the motors, the robot has the hardware it will need to drive itself around without being tethered to a wall. What it doesn't yet have is any code to move with. In the next chapter...