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

Building a scanning sonar

Using the distance sensor we attached in Chapter 8, Programming Distance Sensors with Python, with the pan and tilt mechanism allows us to set up an interesting experiment. If we attach the distance sensor to the head, and then slowly sweep in a direction (for example, the pan direction), we can create a sensor sweep of an area. We can then use some Python code to plot this, making a small map of things in front of the robot.

A sensor similar to this combination is found in advanced robots (like those from Boston Dynamics) and autonomous cars. LIDAR and RADAR sensors use laser light or radio frequencies with a fast spinning drum to perform the same kind of sweeps far faster than our example. LIDAR sensors are starting to appear on the hobbyist market, but are still a little costly.

To visualize this, we are going to use a special kind of chart – a polar plot. This plots around a circle, with the x-axis being where we are around a circle (in radians...