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

Making a robot display the code object

Although we are building around the Pimoroni LED SHIM, we've already seen that there are other types of RGB LED systems. Since we might later swap the SHIM out for a different system, it would be a good idea to make an interface on top of the LEDs. Like the motor's interface, this decouples handling hardware and making behaviors.

Making an LED interface

So, what interface do we want for the LEDs? First, we want them to be available on the robot as robot.leds. We want to clear the LEDs (turn them all off), set each individual LED to a different color, and set a bunch/range of LEDs to a list of colors.

It's useful for the code to tell us how many LEDs we have, so if the number changes, the animations or displays still make some sense.

For the colors, we use three values – r, g, and b – to represent the red, green, and blue components. Python has a type called a tuple, perfect for making a group from a small...