Make a Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot

Chapter 10. Sensors, Sensors, Sensors

When you’re building a robot, some of its most important parts are its sensors. If the computer (the Pi, in our case) is the rover’s brain, then the sensors you choose to pack into it are its eyes (a camera), ears (ultrasound), touch (reed switches and thermometers), equilibrium (accelerometers), and even senses that humans don’t have, like magnetic field detection. The goal of most robots is not just to have sensors to receive input from the outside world, but to act on that input and do something. In the preceding chapter, we learned how to remember where our rover has been, and we touched on the possibility of autonomously navigating to those locations. But just navigating to them is kind of boring unless ...