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

Using the light strip for debugging the avoid behavior

LEDs in rainbows are fun, and switching colors looks nice. However, LEDs can be used for practical purposes too. In Chapter 8, Programming Distance Sensors with Python, we added sensors to our robot to avoid obstacles. You can follow along in a PuTTY window, and see what the sensors are detecting by reading the numbers. But we can do better; with the light strip, we can put information on the robot to tell us what it is detecting.

In this section, we will tie the LED output together to values from a behavior, first by basic lighting, and then by making some rainbow colors, too.

Adding basic LEDs to the avoid behavior

Before we get fancy and reintroduce the rainbow, let's start with the basic version. The intent here will be to make two indicator bars to the left and right side of the LED bar. For each bar, more LEDs will light when the corresponding distance sensor detects a closer obstacle. We'll make it so...