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

Programming a Flask API

This chapter aims to control our robot with Mycroft. To do so, we need to give our robot some way to receive commands from other systems. An Application Programming Interface (API) on a server lets us decouple systems like this to send commands across the network to another and receive a response. The Flask system is ideally suited to building this.

Web-based APIs have endpoints that other systems make their requests to and roughly map to functions or methods in a Python module. As you'll see, we map our API endpoints directly to functions in the Python robot_modes module.

Before we get into building much, let's look at the design of this thing – it will also reveal how Mycroft works.

Overview of Mycroft controlling the robot

The following diagram shows how a user controls a robot via Mycroft:

Figure 15.4 – Overview of the robot skill

The diagram in Figure 15.4 shows how data flows in this system...