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

Planning components and code structure

You've now briefly seen some components you might use in a robot, and you've encountered a block diagram to put them together. This is where you may start taking the next step and thinking further about how to connect things, and how the code you write for them will be structured.

Code is easier to reason about when taken as logical blocks instead of one large lump. Arranging code in ways that are similar to a hardware functionality diagram will help navigate your way around as it becomes more complicated.

So, let's return to the robot block diagram in Figure 2.3 to think about what we'll need to handle in our code for it. That diagram has three sensors and two outputs. Each component (sensor, output, and controller board) may need some code to deal with it, and then you need some code for the behavior of combined modules.

Motor controllers come in many flavors. They have different ways to output to motors, and they...