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 rainbow display with the LEDs

Now we get to use these for some fun. We will extend our avoiding behavior from the previous chapter to show rainbow bar graphs on a side corresponding to the distances read. We could also use this for sensors. Before we can link the movement to the animation, how is a rainbow created?

Colour systems

RGB is how the hardware expects colors. However, RGB is less convenient for expressing intermediate colors or creating gradients between them. Colors that appear close to the eye can be a little far apart when in RGB. Because of this, there are other color systems.

The other color system we use is Hue, Saturation, and Value (HSV). We use HSV in this chapter to make rainbow-type displays and when doing computer vision in a later chapter to assist our code in detecting objects.

Hue

Imagine taking the colors of the spectrum and placing them on a circle, blending through red to orange, orange to yellow, yellow to green, green to blue...