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 voice agent with Mycroft on the Raspberry Pi

The robot backend provided by the Flask control system is good enough to create our Mycroft skill with.

In Figure 15.4, you saw that after you say something with the wake word, upon waking, Mycroft will transmit the sound you made to the Google STT system. Google STT will then return the text.

Mycroft will then match this against vocabulary files for the region you are in and match that with intents set up in the skills. Once matched, Mycroft will invoke an intent in a skill. Our robot skill has intents that will make network (HTTP) requests to the Flask control server we created for our robot. When the Flask server responds to say that it has processed the request (perhaps the behavior is started), the robot skill will choose a dialog to speak back to the user to confirm that it has successfully carried out the request or found a problem.

We'll start with a simple skill, with a basic intent, and then you can...