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

Finding a line again

An important thing to consider is what the robot should do if it has lost the line. Coming back to our examples of an industrial setting, this could be a safety measure.

Our current robot stops. That requires you to put it back on the line. However, when you do so, the robot immediately starts moving again. This behavior is fine for our little robot, but it could be a dangerous hazard for a large robot.

Another behavior that you could consider is to spin until the robot finds the line again. Losing a line can be because the robot has under/oversteered off the line and couldn't find it again, or it could be because the robot has gone past the end of a line. This behavior is suitable perhaps for small robot competitions.

We need to consider things like this carefully and where you would use the robot. Note that for competition-type robots, or industrial robots, they will have either multiple sensors at different angles or a wider angled sensor &...