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 a block diagram

Recall how in Chapter 2, Exploring Robot Building Blocks – Code and Electronics, and throughout the book, we've created block diagrams showing the robot we built there. You can represent any robot in this way. This diagram is where you would have a block for each input and output and then create controller and interface blocks to connect with them. Don't worry about the diagram being perfect; the main point is that the picture conveys which parts you'll connect to others. It's also quite likely that the initial diagram will need some change as you build a robot and come across constraints you were not aware of.

Here are two stages of a block diagram for SpiderBot:

Figure 19.2 – SpiderBot block diagram stages

In Figure 19.2, I initially knew going in that each leg had three motors, but not a lot else. So, I drew those blocks in, along with the distance sensor I want it to have and a Wi-Fi connection...