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

Exercises

  1. Try experimenting with turning on different logging levels and differently named loggers, tuning how much output a robot behavior creates.
  2. For the PID behaviors, tune the PIDs, try high values for the proportional or the integral, and observe how this makes the robot behave. Could you combine this with graphing in matplotlib to observe the PID behavior?
  3. There are a few ways that the drive distance code could be improved. Applying a PID controller to the distance moved by the primary could make it close in more precisely on the exact distance to travel. Detecting no movement in either encoder could be used to make the code stop after a timeout so that it doesn't drive off without stopping. Try this out.
  4. You could now use this code to make further geometric shapes or to follow paths without a line. Try adding high-level left turn/right turn 90-degree functions as building blocks for right-angled path construction, then use this to make paths.
  5. Consider...