#technologyconference

Let’s face it, robots are cool. They’re also going to run the world some day, and hopefully, at that time they will take pity on their poor soft fleshy creators (a.k.a. robotics developers) and help us build a space utopia filled with plenty. I’m joking of course, but only sort of. In my ambition to have some small influence over the matter, I took a course in autonomous robot control theory last year, which culminated in my building a Python-based robotic simulator that allowed me to practice control theory on a simple, mobile, programmable robot. In this article, I’m going to show how to use a Python robot framework to develop control software, describe the control scheme I developed for my simulated robot, illustrate how it interacts with its environment and achieves its goals, and discuss some of the fundamental challenges of robotics programming that I encountered along the way. In order to follow this tutorial on robotics programming for beginners, you should have a basic knowledge of two things: Mathematics—we will use some trigonometric functions and vectors Python—since Python is among the more popular basic robot programming languages—we will make use of basic Python libraries and functions The snippets of code shown here are just a part of the entire simulator, which relies on classes and interfaces, so in order to read the code directly, you may need some experience in Python and object oriented programming. Read the full article