Player/Stage and occam-pi
Because we'd rather play with robots than install software.
To get started with RoboDeb, you'll want to start with the quickstart guide. It does assume that you're familiar with Player/Stage, but might help ease you into developing robotic control algorithms in occam-pi.
If you're just looking to play around with some virtualized robots, and you aren't keen on exploring the interface between concurrency and control, you're probably going to find yourself in over your head. While this is really cool stuffs, it does assume you're keen. Idle curiousity won't get you as far as you'd like, I suspect.
You'll have to start here if you want to download the VM.
While we did wrap the Player/Stage API, we have also provided a higher-level API that hides the low-level details of communicating with your Pioneer, and allows you to instead focus on writing interesting applications in a naturally concurrent way.
A library of utility processes for manipulating the sensor data that comes from the Pioneer. For use in conjunction with the Pioneer robotics library.
This example walks you through a bottom-up construction for an "interesting bump-and-wander" robot. This is, in essence, the example that we used in our SIGCSE'05 paper (PDF) regarding the use of occam-pi on the LEGO Mindstorms for teaching.
This example code accompanies the paper Mobile Robot Control: The Subsumption Architecture and occam-pi and demonstrates a simple subsumptive architecture implemented in occam-pi.
This primer, written by Daniel Hyde is a concise and effective introduction to the occam programming language. Seeing as all we have done is provide a few PROCesses to provide data and manage motor control, learning the basics of the language will help you a great deal in programming your bots.
If you have questions, you should subscribe to our support and discussion list. We're keen to help people get started programming robots the way they were meant to be programmed---using the Transterpreter!