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

Making the robot fully phone-operable

The goal here is to make it so that we can drive the robot completely from the phone. We need to ensure that the robot is ready to run when we turn it on, and make sure that the menu is usable from a phone. The menu we made earlier doesn't seem very touch-friendly. It also will not successfully run any of the behaviors with displays using Flask. We will make the menu buttons bigger and more touch-friendly, using styles similar to our manual drive behavior. The menu will also load our server page after clicking a behavior with a server such as this one or the last chapter's visual tracking behaviors.

Let's fix the Flask behaviors first.

Making menu modes compatible with Flask behaviors

If you've already tried running Flask-based behaviors (such as those with a camera) in the control server, you will have noticed some very odd behavior. Your behavior will appear to do the right thing with sensors on the robot, but the...