So ... that's not quite the "picture of a robot" I was intending to lead this post off with :-)
Strictly speaking, the 'R' in the image above represents a "robot" in the very simple mobile robot simulator that I just developed. RoboSim is written in Python and allows a developer to include a very rudimentary 2D simulator in their project - for instance to test a neural network or genetic algorithm. The robot can rotate on the spot in 45° increments as well as move forward and backwards. Maps are defined as simple nested lists, with internal "walls" defined for areas that cannot be traversed. The robot is fitted with two front bumper switches that are triggered depending on what the robot is pressed against. RoboSim is available on GitHub, and may receive the odd tweak here and there in the future although it has served its purpose in another project already.
My other project is probably going to keep me going for a little while longer, at least until my Raspberry Pi(s) arrive... The project was born out of a hope to combine a couple of them together for a seriously powerful mobile robot. I really wanted to use one for nothing but OpenCV video processing and another for navigation planning etc. What I really didn't want to do was to be constantly swapping between each Pi to upload new code as I tried out different ideas.
Then it occurred to me: wouldn't it be nice if I could just get one or more Pis to act as a "dumb" nodes to run arbitrary Python code provided it to it by a "master" Pi...
A couple of days programming later and the newly Github'd project, DisPy, does this. The README explains it better but essentially, instead of instantiating classes normally, I use a wrapper class to perform the instantiation. Behind the scenes the class' source code is copied over the network to a "node" machine, the class is instantiated on that node and all the local copy's methods and members are replaced by stubs that perform XML-RPC calls back to the "node".
The result is that method calls and member access happens transparently over XML-RPC, allowing for the runtime offloading of arbitrary code to one or many Pis (or anything else that can run Python).
The code is all contained in one module and has minimal dependencies, hopefully it works on other OS' but I haven't tested it on anything other than Ubuntu 11.10 yet. Please fork it, break it and have a play, I'd love your feedback on this one!
