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

Powering the robot

The robot needs power for all its parts. We must consider two major power systems: the power for all the digital parts, such as the Raspberry Pi and sensors, and then the power for the motors.

Motors need a separate power system for a few reasons. First, they consume far more electrical power than most other components on the robot. They may require different voltages; I've seen low-voltage, high-current motor supplies and high-voltage supplies too. The other reason that they need their own power system is that they can cause interference. They can pull enough power that other circuitry has brownouts. A brownout is when circuitry has a voltage drop that is low or long enough to get into an inconsistent or reset state. Resets can lead to SD card corruption on a Pi. Motors can also introduce electrical noise to a power line as they are used, which could cause digital parts to misbehave.

There are two primary strategies for powering a robot with motors:

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