Mastering BeagleBone robotics : master the power of the BeagleBone Black to maximize your robot-building skills and create awesome projects

Robots are quickly bursting from the world of science fiction right into our own living rooms. The small-but-mighty BeagleBone Black embedded processor provides the power and capability to program your own robotic projects using its complete Linux development environment. Mastering BeagleBone Robotics lets you push your creativity to the limit through complex, diverse, and fascinating robotic projects right from scratch. Start off simple by building a tracked robot that moves, sees its environment, and navigates barriers. Go aquatic with a sailing robot that controls its rudder and sail, senses the direction of the wind, and plots its course using GPS. Then plunge beneath the surface of the waves as you create and control a robotic submarine to explore the world underwater with a webcam link. Walk on all fours with a limbed creation, and take to the skies as you create a quadcopter, then use the BeagleBone Black to make it autonomous and fly in its own direction using its own power. Cover 1 Copyright 3 Credits 4 About the Author 5 About the Reviewers 6 www.PacktPub.com 8 Table of Contents 10 Preface 14 Chapter 1: Preparing the BeagleBone Black 20 Unpacking and powering up 21 Installing an operating system 22 Connecting to an external computer 23 Installing a Windows manager 24 Installing additional core software packages 25 Installing a vision library 29 Installing sound capability 32 Creating and recording sound 33 Making your BeagleBone Black speak 36 Installing speech recognition 36 Improving speech recognition accuracy 40 Responding to voice commands 42 Adding additional hardware and software for a fully functional core system 44 Summary 44 Chapter 2: Building a Basic Tracked Vehicle 46 Choosing the tracked platform 46 Connecting a motor controller to control the speed of your tracked platform 47 Choosing the battery 48 Connecting the motor controller 50 Connecting the motor controller system 52 Controlling your mobile platform programmatically using the BeagleBone Black and Python 55 Adding program arguments to control your platform 58 Accessing motor control via voice commands 60 Summary 63 Chapter 3: Adding Sensors to your Tracked Vehicle 64 Basics of sensors 64 Adding distance sensors 64 Sonar sensors 65 Adding an array of inexpensive sonar sensors to the project 66 IR sensors 69 Dynamic path planning for your robot 73 Basic path planning 74 Avoiding obstacles 77 Summary 82 Chapter 4: Vision and Image Processing 84 Connecting a webcam to the BeagleBone Black 84 Using OpenCV 88 Finding colored objects in your vision system 90 Following colored objects with your vision system 94 Finding movement in your vision system 96 Following movement with your robot 102 Summary 104 Chapter 5: Building a Robot that Can Walk 106 Building robots that can walk 106 Working of servomotors 107 Building the quadruped platform 108 Using a servo controller to control the servos 112 Communicating with the servo controller via a PC 114 Connecting the servo controller to the BeagleBone Black 116 Creating a program on Linux to control your quadruped 119 Issuing voice commands to your quadruped 123 Summary 124 Chapter 6: A Robot that Can Sail 126 The BeagleBone Black and robots that can sail 126 Building the sailboat platform 127 Controlling servos with the BeagleBone Black 128 Controlling the servos on the sailboat from a program 131 Remote control of the sailboat 132 A ZigBee tutorial 133 Summary 141 Chapter 7: Using GPS for Navigation 142 Beginning with a GPS tutorial 142 Connecting GPS to the BeagleBone Black 145 Communicating with the GPS 147 Parsing the GPS information 152 Calculating distance and bearing 154 Summary 157 Chapter 8: Measuring Wind Speed – Integrating Analog Sensors 158 Connecting an analog wind speed sensor 159 Getting sensor data from the wind speed sensor 161 Some basics of sailing 164 Summary 169 Chapter 9: An Underwater Remote Operated Vehicle 170 Building the hardware for the ROV 170 Controlling brushless DC motors using the BeagleBone Black 173 Program to control DC motors using the BeagleBone Black 175 Connecting to the BeagleBone Black via a long LAN 185 Accessing a camera for your project 188 Summary 189 Chapter 10: A Quadcopter 190 Basics of quadcopter flight 190 Building the quadcopter 193 Connecting the BeagleBone Black to the quadcopter 194 Controlling the quadcopter using the BeagleBone Black 196 Summary 207 Chapter 11: An Autonomous Quadcopter 208 Controlling quadcopter flight wirelessly 208 Adding a game controller to your system 210 Adding a webcam for autonomous flight 218 Adding GPS for autonomous flight 225 Summary 225 Index 226 www.it-ebooks.info

Robots are quickly bursting from the world of science fiction right into our own living rooms. The small-but-mighty BeagleBone Black embedded processor provides the power and capability to program your own robotic projects using its complete Linux development environment.

Mastering BeagleBone Robotics lets you push your creativity to the limit through complex, diverse, and fascinating robotic projects right from scratch. Start off simple by building a tracked robot that moves, sees its environment, and navigates barriers. Go aquatic with a sailing robot that controls its rudder and sail, senses the direction of the wind, and plots its course using GPS. Then plunge beneath the surface of the waves as you create and control a robotic submarine to explore the world underwater with a webcam link. Walk on all fours with a limbed creation, and take to the skies as you create a quadcopter, then use the BeagleBone Black to make it autonomous and fly in its own direction using its own power.

If you want a simple guide to building complex robots, then this book is for you. You'll need some programming knowledge and experience working with mechanical systems. Master the power of the BeagleBone Black to maximize your robot-building skills and create awesome projects