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

Following colored objects with Python

Now we have some basics ready; we can use this to build some more interesting behaviors.

We will create a behavior that will chase, but not get too close to, a colored object. This behavior will make the robot seem very intelligent. We will revisit color models, covered in Chapter 9, Programming RGB Strips in Python. We'll add color masking and filtering and use the OpenCV contours tools to detect the largest blob of color in an image and point the robot at it.

Building the color-chasing behavior requires a few steps. Let's start with a diagram showing an overview of this whole behavior in Figure 13.12:

Figure 13.12 – The color-tracking behavior

The flow of data in Figure 13.12 starts from camera images. These go through visual processing to get object info from image. get object info from image outputs the object's size (based on the radius of a circle around it) and the object's...