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

What are servo motors?

Servo motors, or servomechanism motors, are used to position robotic appendages such as arms, grippers, legs, and sensor mounts. They create other movements where the position is the main factor, unlike the wheel motors (DC motors), where speed is the controlling factor. Servo motors are used where (to some level of accuracy) turning to a specific place might be required. You can use code to control these precise positioning movements or a sequence of them:

Figure 10.1 – A small selection of servo motors

Servos come in many sizes, from the very small at around 20-30 mm (shown in Figure 10.1) to those large enough to move heavy machinery. Figure 10.2 shows some of the miniature hobby servos I use for my robots:

Figure 10.2 – A small selection of servo motors in robots

Now that you've seen where you might use servo motors, we can dive deeper and find out how a servo motor works.

Looking...