This fruit-named computer is a precious tool for students, artists, and of course hobbyists and hackers. With features for developing things in different areas, it is not a surprise to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of users.
With this credit card-sized development board, you can build robots for $50, $100, $1000, $10.000 … and more. You can make fun applications and robots just to play in your house, or you can try to build amazing things that are supposed to push forward the Raspberry Pi limits.
To create complex robots, you do not need to re-invent the wheel. In fact, you can combine a large variety of existing solutions, technologies and concepts.
However, if you are planning on designing a Raspberry Pi 2 robot, these are the most creative projects that you can reach right now. Yes, you have to see these project briefs pushing your creativity to inspire your next project.
01. Pi Tank
The PiTank design is a mix of a card-sized computer for prototyping things and the 3D printing concept.
Thanks to PiTank designers, this project is open-source and easy to replicate by anyone at home.
The purpose of this robot is to create an intelligent “pet” for any maker or hacker able to write software for it. There are three main components: a Kinect sensor, a smartphone used to control the platform, and the Raspberry Pi 2 board that controls the components of the robot.
If you love to build tracked robots, this robot is one of the cheapest projects that you can build at home from scratch.
02. Autonomous rover with vision
This autonomous robot is a complex project that requires more than a Raspberry Pi 2 board. Only a Pi 2 is not enough to control all the systems integrated into the platform.
The design of the robot consists of 4 essential processes. The first process includes the data from sensors. The second process manages the guidance of the machine. The others two processes include the time sensitive control systems while the final routine handles the speaker.
Given all of these features, the Raspberry Pi 2 board has an essential role. The Pi board is the machine vision system of this robot.
If you want to integrate the Pi 2 with microcontrollers, add a wide range of sensors and a large amount of data, this project is perfect for such a complex combination.
03. Terrestial Explorer V1.0
This is an all-terrain rover that features sensors to scan the environment and wireless equipment to transmit data to the operator.
Like many other complex robots, this one combines the Arduino microcontroller with the power of Raspberry Pi 2. An XBee module is attached to the Arduino microcontroller and sends data from sensors to a remote control with an LCD screen attached.
With sensors able to measure the methane gas levels, temperature, humidity, light intensity, UV, etc., this rover is a good project that connects the Arduino microcontroller with the 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU of the Raspberry Pi 2.
04. Ballin’ Octo Robot
Most of the time, this is a remote controlled truck with machine vision capabilities. The robot truck has a camera attached on top of it and captures images for color tracking and chasing a ball.
This project combines the Arduino microcontroller and the Raspberry Pi 2 board. The Pi board captures video images to send commands to the Arduino and video images to the user.
In autonomous mode, the robot uses the camera captures to detect and follow a ball.
Given all these features, this project includes methods for processing, analyzing, and understanding images with the Raspberry Pi 2.
05. Segway with Raspberry Pi
This wheeled balancing robot is a special project that uses the Pi 2 to control the DC motors, read the 6-axis motion sensor data, run a PID algorithm together with a program that ensures the protection of the robot.
In this project, the designer chooses the Raspbian as the operating system. The Raspbian OS takes the advantage of a good support in the Raspberry Pi community as a respectable Linux distribution.
The Pi board is programmed to measure the orientation of the robot and drive the motors 100 times per second. To protect the robot body, if the angle of orientation is larger than 60 degrees, the motors are stopped as a safety measure.
06. The HoloLens robot
This robot is a special project that uses the Raspberry Pi 2 board with Windows 10 OS and the HoloLens platform for augmented reality. The HoloLens is a head-mounted computer that brings to live the Raspberry Pi 2 robot with a body and a control panel.
This mix between holographic projections and how a robot would behave change the virtual exploration as we know and use it and how we build robots.
07. Roberta
Roberta is another self-balancing robot, but this time much simpler to build. The brain of the robot is a Pi 2 board controlled via remote control.
08. Raspberry Pi 2-wheel balancing robot
It seems that the 2-wheeled balancing robot is a popular application for Pi 2 makers. This project combines LEGO parts with the Raspberry Pi 2 features.
09. Humanoid Robot Controlled by a Raspberry Pi
It is expensive to build a humanoid robot. It’s like making an investment into robotics. An open-source framework such as OpenCv cut the costs of the whole project. And this robot uses the Pi board to run OpenCV applications for autonomous skills.
10. DiddyBorg
What can you do with a Playstation 3 remote control and a 6 wheeled robot platform? Well, there are a lot of options, but this robot kit combines in the best way the 6 axis Playstation 3 remote control and the power of a Raspberry Pi 2 board.
11. Raspberry Pi 2 drone
This Raspberry Pi 2 drone uses the NAVIO+ autopilot shield to determine the position of the drone and control the actuators. This is a solution to cut the costs instead investing money to buy pricey control systems for your drone. Combining the Raspberry Pi features with the NAVIO+ capabilities of sensing the world, is a cheap and friendly solution.
