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

What is a headless system, and why is it useful in a robot?

A headless system is a computer designed to be operated from another computer via a network, at times or in places where keyboard, screen, and mouse access to a device is inconvenient. Headless access is used for server systems, for building robots and making gadgets:

Figure 4.1 – A Raspberry Pi tethered to a screen, keyboard, and mouse

Figure 4.1 shows a system with a head where a user can sit in front of the device. You need to attach a screen, keyboard, and mouse to your robot, and hence it is not very mobile. You may be able to attach/detach them as required, but this is also inconvenient. There are portable systems designed to dock with Raspberry Pis like this, but when a robot moves, you'll need to disconnect it or move with the robot.

At some events, I have seen robots with tiny onboard screens, controlled by a wireless keyboard and mouse. However, in this book, we use a...