Soar Documentation

Soar (Snakes on a Robot) is a Python framework for simulating and interacting with robots.

The software is designed to be the following:

  • painless: Using Soar for its intended purpose should be trivial. A student using Soar as part of an intro robotics course should, in the ideal case, have to look at Getting Started and nothing else.
  • extensible: Soar can support nearly any type of robot and any type of connection, so long as the user provides a suitable interface. Connect to robot’s over a serial port, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc–Soar is interface-agnostic. Though Soar provides basic physics for 2D collision detection and movement, the physics of simulated worlds and objects can be completely overidden.
  • simulation-driven: The most typical use case of Soar will be to run some stepwise simulation on a certain robot type, with some brain controlling it. It is not primarily designed for persistent robots that are always on or for situations where stepwise interaction is not suitable.
  • multiplatform: Soar uses no platform specific features, and uses Python’s standard GUI package, Tkinter, for its GUI. Soar should thus work on any platform with a standard Python interpreter of version 3.5 or later. Soar has been tested on Fedora 25 GNU/Linux, and Windows 8. If an issue arises running Soar on your platform, open an issue on GitHub.
  • open source: Soar is licensed under the LGPLv3, and may be used as a library by projects with other licenses.

To start using Soar, read the Getting Started guide, or look at the documentation for brains and worlds.

Development

Only stable releases of Soar will be published to PyPI or the releases. Development versions will exist only in the GitHub repo itself, and will be marked with a .dev<N> suffix.

Typical versioning will look like the following: <MAJOR>.<MINOR>.<PATCH>. Major releases break backward compatibility, minor releases add functionality but maintain backward compatibility, and patch releases address bugs or fix small things.

If you have a specific feature you’d like to see in Soar, or a specific robot type you’d like bundled with the base software, or just want to contribute, consider opening a pull request.

Indices and tables