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

Detecting the distance traveled in Python

Using encoder sensor devices requires us to count pulses. In this section, we will create code to turn on the motors and count pulses for a while. The code validates that the sensors are connected correctly. We then take this code and make it part of the robot class as a behavior.

Introducing logging

So far in our Python code, we have been using print to output information to see what our robot is doing. This works, but prints can become overwhelming if we print everything we might want to inspect. Logging allows us to still display information, but we can control how much. By importing the logging module, we can take advantage of this.

First, there are logging levels, with debug, info, warning, and error. While fixing problems or initially developing, debug is useful – it can show everything – while info is used to show a little less than that. The warning and error levels are reserved only for those kinds of problems...