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

Introducing Mycroft – understanding voice agent terminology

Mycroft is a software suite known as a voice assistant. Mycroft listens for voice commands and takes actions based on those commands. Mycroft code is written in Python and is open source and free. It performs most of its voice processing in the cloud. After the commands are processed, Mycroft will use a voice to respond to the human.

Mycroft is documented online and has a community of users. There are alternatives that you could consider after you've experimented with Mycroft – for example, Jasper, Melissa-AI, and Google Assistant.

So, what are the concepts of a voice assistant? Let's look at them in the following subsections.

Speech to text

Speech to text (STT) describes systems that take audio containing human speech and turn it into a series of words that a computer can then process.

These can run locally, or they can run in the cloud on far more powerful machines.

Wake words

...