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

Writing a script to follow a predetermined path

So, we now get to the first behavior that feels like a robot. Let's make a quick sketch of a path for us to get our robot to follow. For an example, see Figure 7.7 here:

Figure 7.7 – Path for our robot

In Figure 7.7, I've drawn a path. The straight lines are for driving forward; the 1s mean 1 second. We don't yet have a way to consider distance traveled, only time. We may be able to guess at times relative to distances, but this isn't very precise or repeatable. The gentle curves are a turn where we slow one motor down more than the other.

The final spiral means a victory spin on the spot when the path is complete—we can do this by putting one motor in reverse while the other drives forward.

Let's write this code. First, we want the imports: sleep and robot. But before we do anything, let's make some helper functions for this behavior. I called my file behavior_path...