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

Adding sound input and output to the Raspberry Pi

Before we can use a voice processing/voice assistant, we need to give the Raspberry Pi some speakers and a microphone. A few Raspberry Pi add-ons provide this. My recommendation, with a microphone array (for better recognition) and a connection to speakers, is the ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT, which is widely available.

The next photograph shows the ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT:

Figure 15.1 – The ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT

Figure 15.1 shows a photo of a ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT mounted on a Raspberry Pi. On the left, I've labeled the left microphone. The hat has two microphones, which are two tiny rectangular metal parts on each side. The next label is for 3 RGB LEDs and a button connected to a GPIO pin. After this are the two ways of connecting speakers – a 3.5mm jack or a JST connector. I recommend you connect a speaker to hear output from this HAT. Then, the last label highlights the right microphone...