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

Setting up computer vision software

Before we can start writing code, we'll need to set up drivers, tools, and libraries to interact with the camera and software to assist with computer vision.

In this section, we will activate the camera in Raspberry Pi OS Raspberry Pi OS and get a test picture. Then we will add the libraries to start interacting with the camera for visual processing.

We will then build our first app with the tool to demonstrate that the parts are in place and give us a starting point for the behaviors. Let's get into setting up the software.

Setting up the Pi Camera software

So that the camera is ready to use, we need to enable it:

  1. Power up the Pi on external power (that is, plugged into a USB wall adapter) for this operation, leaving the motors powered down for now.
  2. Log in via SSH. At the terminal, type the following:
    pi@myrobot:~ $ sudo raspi-config
  3. You should now see raspi-config. Select the Interfacing Options menu item by...