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

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned how to look after your code and configuration. You have seen how things can go wrong, and the strategies to protect your work from them. You have a starting point with Git, SFTP, and SD card backups that you can use together to be a bit more experimental and fearless about changes to your robot. You can use SFTP to edit on your computer, giving you at least one copy other than the code on your robot and letting you use powerful editors. You can use Git to go back in time, so you can wind back from mistakes and experiments, or just see the differences. You can use SD card backups to get a complete image of the storage your Raspberry Pi is using, and restore it if it goes wrong.

In the next chapter, we'll start to build a basic robot. We'll assemble the robot chassis with motors and wheels, determine what power systems to use, then test fit the overall shape of our robot. Bring a screwdriver!