Python Robotics Simulator

Short Descpription

This is the first assignment for the Reserch Track I course of Robotics Engineering Master Degree in Genoa.

This project consists into move a robot to take all the tokens in the space and to put all of them toghether in a 2D environment. This is composed by some tokens (silver or gold) and an arena where the robot has to stay.
This robot can grab the boxes only if near enough and release them in every position of the arena.
In This case the tokens are always the same (gold with same code), such as the position of them and the position of the robot too. Video example:

Installing and running

The simulator requires:

• Python 2.7 or Python 3
• pygame library
• PyPyBox2D
• PyYAML.

Pygame, unfortunately, can be tricky (though not impossible) to install in virtual environments. If you are using pip, you might try pip install hg+https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame, or you could use your operating system's package manager. Windows users could use Portable Python. PyPyBox2D and PyYAML are more forgiving, and should install just fine using pip or easy_install.

Troubleshooting

When running python run.py <file>, you may be presented with an error: ImportError: No module named 'robot'. This may be due to a conflict between sr.tools and sr.robot. To resolve, symlink simulator/sr/robot to the location of sr.tools.

On Ubuntu, this can be accomplished by:

• Find the location of srtools: pip show sr.tools
• Get the location. In my case this was /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
• Create symlink: ln -s path/to/simulator/sr/robot /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/sr/

How to Install

To run this code you have to follow a few of steps:

• clone the repository

  $ git clone https://github.com/fabiogueunige/RT1_Assignment1.git

• move inside robot-sim folder

  $ cd robot-sim/

• run the code:

  $ python3 run.py assignment.py 

Usage

You can download the package and make all your changes (this is the Licence for the distribution).

To run all your scripts use run.py before your node-name file, as follow:

$ python3 run.py <node_fle>

Contribution

Please, do not push changes to this project, but if you want you are free to download it.
The actual organization is composed by two branches:

• main -> There are all the files necessary for the environment and the Robot operation.
• readRes -> All the resources for the Readme construction.

Possible Improvements

There are several improvements that can be made to the project such as:

• environment changes:
• • Create a more randomic environment and a more randomic starting position for the Robot
  • Add different types of token
  • Implement an absolute and a relative distance for the Robot class
• functions: New possible function for different situations like:
• • wall escaping: Escape from a wall of the arena when the Robot is stuck (understand also when it is really stuck)
  • Improve the motion of the Robot
  • Improve the Robot planning (take the best decision to catching the token)

Robot Api

The API for controlling a simulated robot is designed to be as similar as possible to the [SR API][sr-api]. More details information can be obtained in this link