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

Choosing a robot chassis kit

The chassis, like the controller, is a fundamental decision when making a robot. Although these can be self-made using 3D printing or toy hacking, the simplest place to start is with a chassis kit. These kits contain sets of parts to start your robot build. A chassis can be changed, but it would mean rebuilding the robot.

The internet has plenty of chassis kits around – too many. So how do you choose one?

Size

Getting the size of a robot right matters too. Make too small a robot and you will need miniaturization skills for electronics; too large and you will need far more serious power handling. These are both things to avoid for a beginner:

Figure 6.1 – Robot chassis sizes compared

We can compare different robot sizes from the chassis photos in Figure 6.1:

  • Chassis 1 has a diameter of 11 cm and just about fits a controller in but is too tiny. Being so small makes it hard to build your robot. Squeezing...