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

Choosing the parts

Throughout this book, we have looked at the tradeoffs between different kinds of sensors, different chassis kits, controllers, and so on. These are tradeoffs on weight, complexity, availability (you don't want an irreplaceable part), and cost, covered in detail in Chapter 6, Building Robot Basics – Wheels, Power, and Wiring.

If a particular kit inspired the robot—for example, SpiderBot was inspired by a hexapod kit; yours could be a robot arm or caterpillar track kit—this will likely constrain the other part choices you need to make. I'd need to support 18 servo motors; however, I had a 16-motor controller available, so I elected to use two input/output (I/O) pins of the central controller for the remaining two servos. This added software complexity, though.

Another tradeoff was the main controller. I knew that I'd want SpiderBot to be Wi-Fi-enabled, but it wasn't going to be doing visual processing, so a small, cheap...