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You're reading from  Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2021
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781839218804
Edition2nd Edition
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Danny Staple
Danny Staple
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Danny Staple

Danny Staple builds robots and gadgets as a hobbyist, makes videos about his work with robots, and attends community events such as PiWars and Arduino Day. He has been a professional Python programmer, later moving into DevOps, since 2009, and a software engineer since 2000. He has worked with embedded systems, including embedded Linux systems, throughout the majority of his career. He has been a mentor at a local CoderDojo, where he taught how to code with Python. He has run Lego Robotics clubs with Mindstorms. He has also developed Bounce!, a visual programming language targeted at teaching code using the NodeMCU IoT platform. The robots he has built with his children include TankBot, SkittleBot (now the Pi Wars robot), ArmBot, and SpiderBot.
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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...

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Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition
Published in: Feb 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781839218804

Author (1)

author image
Danny Staple

Danny Staple builds robots and gadgets as a hobbyist, makes videos about his work with robots, and attends community events such as PiWars and Arduino Day. He has been a professional Python programmer, later moving into DevOps, since 2009, and a software engineer since 2000. He has worked with embedded systems, including embedded Linux systems, throughout the majority of his career. He has been a mentor at a local CoderDojo, where he taught how to code with Python. He has run Lego Robotics clubs with Mindstorms. He has also developed Bounce!, a visual programming language targeted at teaching code using the NodeMCU IoT platform. The robots he has built with his children include TankBot, SkittleBot (now the Pi Wars robot), ArmBot, and SpiderBot.
Read more about Danny Staple