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

Reading the gyroscope in Python

In this section, we are going to use the gyroscope in the IMU. We will use it to approximate where the robot is facing in three dimensions.

But before we do that, let's understand it.

Understanding the gyroscope

A gyroscope measures rotation as a rate of change in angle, perhaps in degrees per second. At each measurement, it can determine the speed of rotation around each axis:

Figure 12.13 – Illustration of a gyroscope

A gyroscope is traditionally a mechanical system, as shown in the preceding image. It has a gimbal – a set of concentric rings – connected by pivots so that they can pivot around the X-axis, Y-axis, and Z-axis. The middle has a spinning mass, known as a rotor. When the rotor is spinning, moving the handle (shown as a stand at the bottom of the image) does not affect the spinning mass, which keeps its orientation, with the gimbals allowing it to turn freely.

In the case...