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

Exploring types of robot components

Before we look at the types of motors and sensors, let's get a brief understanding of what each of them is.

A motor is an output device that rotates when power is applied. Motors are a subset of a type of machinery called an actuator. It is an output device that creates motion from electrical power. This power can be modulated with signals to control movement. Examples of actuators are solenoids, valves, and pneumatic rams.

A sensor is a device that provides input to a robot, allowing it to sense its environment. There are more sensor types than a single book can list, so we'll keep to the commonly available and fun-to-use ones. Displays and indicators are debug output devices, for giving feedback on the robot's operation to a human user/programmer. A few of these will be covered in this section.

Now, let's look at them in detail.

Types of motors

There are a number of different kinds of motors that robots commonly...