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

Tracking faces with Python

Detecting faces (or other objects) by features is a smart behavior. Once our robot is detecting faces, it will point the pan-and-tilt mechanism at the nearest (well, largest) face.

Using Haar cascades is a common technique, well documented in a paper by Paul Viola and Michael Jones (known as Viola Jones). In essence, it means using a cascade of feature matches to search for a matching object. We will give an overview of this technique, then put it into use on our robot to create a fun behavior. Using different cascade model files, we could pick out faces or other objects.

Finding objects in an image

We will be using an algorithm implemented in OpenCV as a single and useful function, which makes it very easy to use. It provides a simple way to detect objects. More advanced and complex methods involve machine learning, but many systems use Haar cascades, including camera apps on phones. Our code will convert the images into grayscale (black through...