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 an accelerometer in Python

In this section, we will learn how to use an accelerometer to measure forces acting on the robot, and most often, which way is down. Let's find out more about it, then write some code to see how it works.

Understanding the accelerometer

An accelerometer measures acceleration or changes in speed, both in terms of size and direction. It does so by providing three values – one for each of the X, Y, and Z axes:

Figure 12.17 – Accelerometer concept – mass with springs

The preceding diagram shows a conceptual view of an accelerometer. Let's take a look at it in more detail:

  1. This shows a ball (a mass) suspended by six springs in a box. When there are no forces on the box, the ball stays in the middle.
  2. This shows how this system behaves when the large arrow pushes it. The mass retains inertia by moving to the right, compressing the right spring and extending the left spring.
  3. ...