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Pyro stands for Python Robotics. The goal of the project is to provide a programming environment for easily exploring advanced topics in artificial intelligence and robotics without having to worry about the low-level details of the underlying hardware. That is not to say that Pyro is just a toy. In fact, Pyro is used for real robotics research as well as courseware.
Pyro is written in Python. Python is an interpreted language, which means that you can experiment interactively with your robot programs. In addition to being an environment, Pyro is also a collection of object classes in Python. Because Pyro abstracts all of the underlying hardware details, it can be used for experimenting with several different types of mobile robots and robot simulators. Until now, it has been necessary to learn very different and specific control languages for different mobile robots, particularly those manufactured by different companies. Now, a single language can be used to program many different robots, allowing code to be shared across platforms as well as allowing students to experiment with different robots while learning a single language and environment.
Robots: Currently, the robots supported include the Pioneer family (Pioneer, Pioneer2, PeopleBot robots), the Khepera family (Khepera, Khepera 2 and Hemisson robots), the AIBO, the IntelliBrain-Bot, and the Roomba.
Simulators: Pyro is integrated with several existing robot simulators including Robocup Soccer, Player/Stage, Gazebo and the Khepera simulator.
Pyro has the ability to define different styles of controllers, which are called the robot's brain. For example, the control system could be a neural network, behavior based, or a symbolic planner. One unique characteristic of Pyro is the ability to write controllers using robot abstractions that enable the same controller to operate robots with vastly different morphologies. That is, a controller program written for a Khepera robot (hockey puck-sized, with infrared sensors) could work equally well for a Pioneer robot (medium suitcase-sized, with sonar sensors).
Pyro 5.0.0 features:
- Open source - available for study, or changing
- Designed for students, faculty and researchers
- Works on many real robotics platforms and simulators
- Extensive course modules include control methods, vision (motion tracking, blobs, etc.), learning (neural networks, reinforcement learning, self-organizing maps, etc.), evolutionary algorithms, and more.
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