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 the physical robot

Let's now put all of this to use and plan the layout of the physical parts of robot that we are making in this book. While we go through chapters, we will be adding new components each time, and keeping an overall map in our minds as we go helps us to see where we are. It is quite exciting to start to picture all the things a robot will do. Let's start with a list of what our robot will do and be:

  • It will have wheels and be able to drive around the floor.
  • It will have a Raspberry Pi 3A+ controller.
  • It will have a motor controller for the wheels.
  • It will be able to indicate its status with a set of multicolored LEDs.
  • The robot will use a pair of servo motors for a pan and tilt mechanism.
  • It will be able to avoid walls and navigate around obstacles with either ultrasonic or laser distance sensors.
  • It will have an encoder per wheel to know how far it has moved.
  • The robot will use a camera to sense colored objects...