Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

BeagleBone Blue is effectively a small, light, cheap computer in a similar vein to Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It has all of the extensibility of today’s desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. This project guide provides step-by-step instructions that enable anyone to use this new, low-cost platform in some fascinating robotics projects. By the time you are finished, your projects will be able to see, speak, listen, detect their surroundings, and move in a variety of amazing ways. The book begins with unpacking and powering up the components. This includes guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully, and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Blue. You will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including making the system see using a webcam, hear using a microphone, and speak using a speaker. You will then learn to use the new hardware capability of the BeagleBone Blue to make your robots move, as well as discover how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects. Later, you will learn to remotely control your robot through iOS and Android devices. At the end of this book, you will see how to integrate all of these functionalities to work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: Drone and Submarine.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 5. Allowing Our BeagleBone Blue to See

Our projects can communicate via voice, and now we are going to provide the details of adding a webcam to our system so that we can add vision to our projects. We'll use this functionality in lots of different applications; it will make our projects seem very advanced. Fortunately, adding hardware and software to provide vision to our projects is both easy and inexpensive.

Vision will open a set of possibilities for your project. These can range from simple motion detection to advance capabilities such as facial recognition, object identification, and even object following. You can also use vision to detect the world around you and avoid obstacles. Vision is central to our existence as human beings and can provide a whole new level of coolness to your projects.

In this chapter, you will learn:

  • How to connect your USB camera to our BeagleBone Blue and view the images
  • How to download and install OpenCV, a fully featured vision library
  • How to use the...