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

Steering a robot

Now, we've made a robot drive forward. But how do we steer it? How does it turn left or right? In order to understand this, we need to first learn about a few significant forms of steering that exist. Let's take a look at some, settle on the one our robot uses, and write some test code to demonstrate it.

Types of steering

The most common techniques for steering a wheeled vehicle (including a robot) fall into two major categories—steerable wheels and fixed wheels, as discussed in the following subsections. Each of them comes with a couple of slightly unusual variants.

Steerable wheels

In movable wheel designs, one or more wheels in a robot face in a different direction from the others. When the robot drives, the differently positioned wheel makes the robot turn. There are two common styles of movable wheel steering on a robot, as shown here in Figure 7.2:

Figure 7.2 – Steerable wheel types

The green arrows...