Bringing Robots to Life with Python

A Primer on Integrating Hardware and Sensors

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

As the field of robotics grows across industries from manufacturing to healthcare and beyond, engineers increasingly turn to Python for development thanks to its versatility, supportive ecosystem and approachability for integrating hardware sensors and controls.

By walking through some fundamental examples, we’ll explore ways Python brings robotics projects to life through code. These building blocks form a foundation for more capable autonomous systems or even your own hobby robot!

Reading Serial Devices

For simple robotics, serial connections transmit sensor readings and accept motor controls from separately managed hardware circuits over a wired bus.

Python’s PySerial handles these communications:

import serial
ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600)
while True:
 command = input("Enter motor speed:") 
 ser.write(command.encode())
 print(ser.readline().decode())

This loops awaiting user input to encode and transmit to hardware, reading back a motor sensor response. We integrate other serial sensors replacing printouts with data handling.

Interfacing Camera Feeds