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

Exercises

This code is fun, but there are many ways you could improve the behaviors. Here are some suggested ways to extend this code and deepen your learning:

  • Use the control pipeline to allow a user to tune the color filters, correct radius, and PID values from the web page. Perhaps the initial PID values should be close to the other tunable values?
  • There is quite a lot of setup code. Could you put this into a function/method?
  • Could the queues to the web page be used to send the debug data to the page, instead of printing them in the console? Could the data be plotted in a graph?
  • The field of view for tracking with the Pi Camera is pretty narrow. A wide-angle lens would improve the field of view a lot, letting the robot see more.
  • The camera doesn't perform too well when it's dark. The robot has an LED strip, but it's not illuminating much. Could you add a bright LED as a headlamp for the camera?
  • You could track other objects by trying the...