Python All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3

Programming Your Robot Rover

IN THIS CHAPTER

Moving and sensing with your robot

Understanding autonomous vehicles

The first two chapters of this minibook give you a basic understanding of robots and (more important) the major components of robots. They show you that Python can control these components so that they can work together to accomplish robotic tasks. That’s a lot of information.

In this chapter, you see how to string together these components and software to make a simple robotic brain so that your robot rover can move by itself. The rover won’t be a fully functional self-driving car, but after going through this chapter, you will have some sense of how those large self-driving cars are programmed.

Building a Simple, High-Level Python Interface

In this section, you make a short Python module that allows you to build more complicated programs while hiding the complexity of dealing with the robot hardware.

Our high-level robotic interface is a Python class file called RobotInterface.py. The code length is beyond what we want to list in the book, but it is available at www.dummies.com/go/pythonaiofd3e. We describe a few functions and then show you how to use the rest of the module.

The motorForward() function

The motorForward() function is typical of the motor ...