Danny Staple - Learn Robotics Programming: Build and Control Autonomous Robots Using Raspberry Pi 3 and Python

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First published: November 2018

Production reference: 1281118

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ISBN 978-1-78934-074-7

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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.

Leo White is a professional software engineer, and a graduate of the University of Kent. His interests include electronics, 3D printing, and robotics. He first started programming on the Commodore 64, later wrote several applications for the Acorn Archimedes, and currently programs set-top boxes for his day job. Utilizing the Raspberry Pi as a base, he has mechanized children's toys and driven robot arms, blogging about his experiences and processes along the way, has given presentations at Raspberry Jams, and entered a variety of robots in the Pi Wars competition.

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Learn Robotics is about building and programming a robot with smart behaviors. It covers the skills required to makes, and build, a gadget from parts, including how to choose them. This book follows with how to make the code to make those parts do something interesting. The book uses Python, together with a little bit of HTML/CSS and JS.

The technology shown here is intended to include things that are available and affordable, and the code intended to demonstrate concepts, so that these can be used and combined to create even more interesting code and robots.

It combines aspects of being a programmer, with aspects of being a robot maker, with a number of specialist topics such as computer vision and voice assistants thrown in.

This book is intended for someone with a little programming experience. They do not need to be an expert-level programmer, but to have written some lines of code and be comfortable with looping, conditionals, and functions. Object oriented (class and object)-based programming isn't necessary, but is introduced in the book.

The book does not require a specialist workshop, although there will be a little soldering. This will be introduced later in the book.

The reader does not need to have any experience at all of electronics or making things, but hopefully a healthy interest in learning more, since some very basic concepts are introduced throughout the book. Being keen to build a robot, get it to do stuff, and find out what to do with it next is probably the most important aspect of the book.