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

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how to incorporate wheel encoder sensors into our robot and used them to determine how far each wheel has turned. We saw how to use this to get the robot onto a straighter path using a reduced PID controller and then used this to drive a specific distance. We then took the calculations further to calculate turning a corner in terms of wheel movements and driving the robot in a square.

A PID controller can be used in many situations where you need to apply a difference between a measurement and expectation, and you have seen how to combine this with sensors. You could use the same system to control a heating element connected to a thermal sensor. You could also use encoders to move robots with some precision, where the restricted range of motion used in servo motors does not make sense.

In the next couple of chapters, we will explore giving our robot even more interactive and intelligent behaviors, with chapters on visual processing using a Raspberry...