Chapter 18: Taking Your Robot Programming Skills Further

You've now learned some beginner building skills and some of the more exciting programming tricks we can use with robotics. However, this robot is only really suitable for a lab; it's not ready for competitions or touring, and this is only the start of your robotics journey. There is also a large community of robot builders and makers that come from many angles.

In this chapter, you will learn how to continue your journey, how to find communities, how to look for new challenges, and where to learn more robotics skills. You will learn what skill areas there are beyond this book, and why they will help you make more robots.

How can you be part of this? Let's find out!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Online robot building communities – forums and social media
• Meeting robot builders – competitions, makerspaces, and meetups
• Suggestions for further skills ...

Online robot building communities – forums and social media

Robot building is a topic that shares a space with the general community of makers. Makers are everywhere. There are ham radio and electronics enthusiasts who are more connected to the electronics side of robot building, and there are artists who are using devices such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi to bring their creations to life. Teachers are using these devices to show children the world of technology or teach other subjects to them. There are also people with problems to solve or brilliant and sometimes crazy ideas to try out.

Robotics is part of the maker community, which has a strong presence on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Search for tags such as #raspberrypi (https://twitter.com/hashtag/RaspberryPi), #arduino (https://twitter.com/hashtag/Arduino), and #makersgonnamake (https://twitter.com/hashtag/makersgonnamake) to find these communities. A rallying point is the @GuildOfMakers (https://twitter.com...

Meeting robot builders – competitions, makerspaces, and meetups

As you start to build more, meeting up with other makers is a must. First, you will gain from the experience and knowledge in the community, but there is also a great social aspect to this. Some events are free, but the larger ones will have fees associated with them.

Makerspaces

These spaces are for any kind of maker, be it robotics, crafting, arts, or radio specialists. They serve as tool collectives with a collection of tools any maker may need, along with space to use them.

You can expect to find a collection of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines such as 3D printers, laser cutters, lathes, and mills for cutting materials and drills. They also usually have a full electronics bench and many kinds of hand tools in these spaces.

Some have the materials for making Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). Makerspaces also have a community of people using these tools for their projects. People are there for...

Suggestions for further skills – 3D printing, soldering, PCB, and CNC

As you build more robots, you will want to create more elaborate or customized systems.

To build a competition-grade robot, you will need more hardware building skills.

Design skills

We've used block diagrams and simple drawings throughout this book. However, to become more serious about robot building, you'll want to design parts or check that bought parts will integrate with your robot. You will want to create cases, chassis, sensor mounts, brackets, wheel types, and any number of parts, for which Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is key.

2D design for illustration and diagrams

For 2D design and illustration, I recommend Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/). Inkscape is more artistic than CAD-oriented, but it is handy if you wish to make logos and other designs. It is quite complicated, so I recommend a book such as Inkscape Beginner's Guide, Bethany Hiitola, Packt Publishing, to get...

Finding more information on computer vision

We started looking at computer vision in Chapter 13, Robot Vision – Using a Pi Camera and OpenCV. We used OpenCV to track colored objects and faces but barely scratched the surface of computer vision.

Books

I recommend the book OpenCV with Python By Example, Prateek Joshi, Packt Publishing, if you wish to continue learning about OpenCV. This book uses computer vision to build augmented reality tools and to identify and track objects and takes you through different image transformations and checks, showing screenshots for each of them. It is also quite fun as it contains lots of hands-on code.

You can even extend computer vision further to 3D computer vision with the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor bar. Although they are no longer produced by Microsoft, they are extremely common and fairly cheap on eBay. Note that there is a modern Azure Connect device you can use for this, but at the time of writing, this is 20 times the price! The...

Extending to machine learning

Some of the smartest sounding types of robotics are those involved in machine learning. The code used throughout this book has not used machine learning and is instead used well-known algorithms. The Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller you used in this book is a system that makes adjustments to read a value, but it is not machine learning. However, optimizing PID values might come from a machine learning algorithm. We used Haar Cascade models to detect faces; this was also not machine learning, though OpenCV contributors probably used a machine learning system to generate these cascades.

Machine learning tends to be great at optimizing tasks and discovering and matching patterns, but poor at making fully formed intelligent-seeming behavior.

The basic overall idea of many machine learning systems involves having a set of starting examples, with some information on which are matches and which are not. The machine is expected to determine...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to find out who else and where else robots like the ones we covered in this chapter are being made, as well as how to be part of those communities. Sharing knowledge with other robot builders will accelerate your journey.

You've also learned where to compete with a robot, where to get more advice, and how to find information to progress the different skills you've started building much further. This inspiration and direction should make it easy for you to keep growing your robot skills.

In the next chapter, we will summarize everything that we have learned throughout this book, with a view toward building your next robot.

Further reading

The following are further practical robotics books available that I enjoy:

• Python Robotics Projects, Prof. Diwakar Vaish, Packt Publishing: This book offers more Raspberry Pi and Python robotics projects for you to practice with.
• Robot Building for Beginners, David Cook, Apress: This book leads you through building sandwich, a scratch-built robot based on a lunchbox. It is a little more maker- and electronics-based, but it is quite a fun project to follow.
• Learning Raspberry Pi, Samarth Shah, Packt Publishing: You can dig further into what can be done with a Raspberry Pi here and find inspiration for enhancing your robots within the sections of this book.
• Robot Builder's Bonanza (5th Edition), Gordon McComb, McGraw-Hill Education TAB: This was an influential book and is quite extensive in terms of how to make a robot. This is the best book for going beyond buying kits and constructing bigger and more mechanically complicated robots.

...