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

Attaching and reading an ultrasonic sensor

First, we should wire in and secure these sensors to the robot. We then write some simple test code that we can use to base our behavior code on in the next section. After completing this section, the robot block diagram should look like Figure 8.7:

Figure 8.7 – Robot block diagram with ultrasonic sensors

This diagram builds on the block diagram in Figure 6.33 from Chapter 6, Building Robot Basics – Wheels, Power, and Wiring by adding left and right ultrasonic sensors. Both have bi-directional arrows to the Raspberry Pi, since, being an active sensor, the Raspberry Pi triggers a sensor measurement and then reads back the result. Let's attach the sensors to the robot chassis.

Securing the sensors to the robot

In the Technical requirements section, I added an HC-SR04 bracket. Although it is possible to make a custom bracket with CAD and other part making skills, it is more sensible to use one...