Our Raspberry Pi robot has proven to be very popular, as it allows people to easily put together a fun little robot, that they can drive around using a smartphone, tablet or computer, whilst viewing the world with the camera on the robot. However, fun as this is, it’s hard to view this ‘robot’ as being much more than a remote controlled toy. Our personal view has always been that a robot should be autonomous in some way, and that’s why we’ve been working on a programming interface for our robot that will let users of our robots create cool, autonomous behaviours.

Bring your robot to life with Python and OpenCV

The interface is a Python library called py_websockets_bot. The library communicates with the robot over a network interface, controlling it’s movements and also streaming back images from its camera so that they can be processed with the computer vision library OpenCV. Communicating over a network interface means that your scripts can either run on the robot, or they can run on a separate computer. This feature is really useful if you want to use a computer more powerful than the Pi to run advanced AI and computer vision algorithms, or if you want to coordinate the movement of multiple robots.

In this post we show you how to install the interface library, and provide some example programs, that show you how to make the robot move, how to retrieve images from the camera and how to manipulate the images with OpenCV. Continue reading →