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

Learning more about IMUs

An IMU is a combination of sensors designed to sense a robot's movement in a 3D space. These devices are found in drones, useful in floor-based robots, and critical for balancing robots. The IMU is not a single sensor, but a collection designed to be used together and have their readings combined.

These devices are tiny but have their roots in flight hardware with large spinning gyroscopes. IMUs use the micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology to put mechanical devices on micro-scale chips. They do have tiny moving parts and use electronic sensors to measure their movements.

Since some measurements are analog (see Chapter 2, Exploring Controllers and I/O, IMU modules often include an analog to digital converter (ADC) and communicate over I2C.

There are different combinations of sensors on an IMU. These sensors are as follows:

  • A temperature sensor, to account for temperature effects on other sensors
  • A gyroscope, which measures...