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

Trying computer vision with test images

In this section, we will look out how and why to use test images. We will write our first chunk of code for this behavior and try it on test images from our robot's camera. These tests will prepare us for using the code to drive the robot.

Why use test images?

So far, our computer vision work has been written directly with robot behaviors; this is the end goal of them, but sometimes, you want to try the visual processing code in isolation.

Perhaps you want to get it working or work out bugs in it, or you may want to see whether you can make the code faster and time it. To do this, it makes sense to run that particular code away from the robot control systems.

It also makes sense to use test images. So, instead of running the camera and needing light conditions, you can run with test images you've already captured and compare them against the result you expected from them.

For performance testing, trying the same image...