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

Chapter 7: Drive and Turn – Moving Motors with Python

In this chapter, we will take the robot we started building in the last chapter, connect the motors to the Raspberry Pi, and build the Python code to make them move. We will cover programming techniques to create a layer between the physical robot and its behavior code, to reduce the impact of hardware changes. Our code and build will get the robot moving! We finish by programming the robot to drive a small set path. The robot code layer will serve as a foundation for all our robot behaviors, and the set path will demonstrate how to use it.

We cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Writing code to test your motors
  • Steering a robot
  • Making a Robot object—code for our experiments to talk to the robot
  • Writing a script to follow a predetermined path