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

Adding a pan and tilt mechanism

We are now going to build and add a pan and tilt servo mechanism to our robot. This mechanism is like a head for our robot to mount sensors on it. A pan and tilt mechanism, shown in Figure 10.8, moves a sensor (or anything else) through two axes under servo motor control.

Pan means to turn left or right. Tilt means to tilt up or down:

Figure 10.8 – A pan and tilt mechanism from a typical kit

Kits like the one in Figure 10.8 are available from Mouser, along with Adafruit outlets. You may need to purchase the servo motors separately. There are other types of pan-tilt. Ensure it is the type that uses two servos and refer to the manufacturer's documentation where it is different. We build the kit, mount it onto our robot, and plug it into the controller.

Our robot block diagram with the servos looks like Figure 10.9:

Figure 10.9 – Block diagram of the robot with servo motors...