Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects

By : Dr. Richard Grimmett
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects

By: Dr. Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

<p>Robotics development is accelerating, and an amazing array of new hardware and software capabilities are available to anyone with an interest in the area. Robots will soon be a part of our everyday life, and it will soon be as important to know how they work as it is to know how a computer works. Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized, fully capable PC that can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, such as spreadsheets, word processing, and games.</p> <p>This book starts with the essentials of turning on the basic hardware. It provides the capability to interpret your commands and have your robot initiate actions. By the time you are through, you’ll have robots that can speak, listen, and move in a number of amazing ways.</p> <p>This book is a step-by-step projects guide to unlocking some complex and interesting capabilities of Raspberry Pi. Teaching you to use Raspberry Pi from scratch, this book will discuss a wide range of capabilities that can be achieved with it. These capabilities include voice recognition, human-like speech simulation, computer vision, motor control, GPS location, and wireless control. You will then learn how to combine these capabilities to create your own robotics projects.</p> <p>By the time you have completed this book, you will be able to use Raspberry Pi to create some complex and fascinating robotics projects with a vast array of capabilities.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Gathering the required hardware


You'll need to add some hardware, specifically a wheeled or tracked platform, to make your project mobile. You're going to use a platform that will use differential motion to propel and steer the vehicle. This simply means that instead of turning the wheels, you're going to vary the speed and direction of the two motors that drive the wheels or tracks. There are a lot of choices: some are completely assembled, while others require some assembly; or, you can buy the components and construct your own custom mobile platform.

Throughout this book, I'm going to assume that you don't want to do any soldering or mechanical machining yourself, so let's look at a couple of the more popular variants that are available completely assembled or that can be assembled with simple tools (a screwdriver and/or pliers). The simplest mobile platform is one that has two DC motors, each of which controls a single wheel with a small ball in the front or at the back. DC motors are...