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

When speech control won't work – why we need to drive

In Chapter 15, Voice Communication with a Robot Using Mycroft, we built a Mycroft system to launch behaviors. If you have tried to build intents to make the robot stop in time or drive left or right, you will have probably noticed that it takes some time to respond even with the clearest speaking.

Speech control also only really works in a quiet room. If your robot is outside (you would like to drive it somewhere), this is not useful.

Mycroft is also utterly dependent on having access to the internet. It is one thing to have a small shared network for a robot and a controller; it's another to always require internet access, which can become tricky when not at your home, school, or lab.

Using an SSH session to log in to a robot, then typing commands to start and stop behaviors works well during testing stages, but it can be slow and cumbersome. In demonstration conditions, mistyping a command or just restarting...