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.
Contents:
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.