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

Chapter 17: Controlling the Robot with a Phone and Python

The robot we've been programming has many behaviors, but when you run some of them, they result in the robot stopping on the other side of the room. You could try to write code to return it back to you, but this may be complicated. We've also got a neat camera with some visual feedback available on what the robot is doing. Wouldn't it be neat to take control and drive the robot sometimes?

We've been launching commands to drive our robot from a Secure Shell (SSH) terminal, but the robot will be more exciting and more comfortable to demonstrate if you could start the commands via a menu. We can build upon the web application programming interface (API) code you made in Chapter 15, Voice Communication with a Robot Using Mycroft.

In this chapter, we will see how to create a menu system to choose behaviors designed for a phone. We will then use the touch surface to build a control system, with the camera...