COHRINT/cops_and_robots

Robotic cops & robbers project for dynamic target-tracking on the iRobot Create platform

##Cops and Robots

Cops and Robots is a testbed for experimental research done by the COHRINT lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This repository is a code backend to support robot control, human interface and dynamic target tracking.

The testbed is broken up into three parts: python simulation, gazebo simulation, and hardware experiment. The code for the python simulation lives in src/cops_and_robots, the code for the gazebo simulation lives at the root level of this project, and the code for the experiment is not yet ready.

Note: all code, including on the Master branch, is volatile. Use at your own risk.

See the documentation for a low-level discussion of the Python code.

Installation Instructions

For Unix-based systems (specifically OS X and Ubuntu 14.04) only. Sorry, Windows users, but you're on your own.

Create and load a virtual environment:

pip install virtualenv
mkdir ~/virtual_environments # or whatever you'd like to name your folder
cd ~/virtual_environments 
virtualenv --no-site-packages cops_and_robots # or whatever you'd like to name your environment
source cops_and_robots/bin/activate

Install SciPy:

# On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev gfortran
pip install numpy scipy matplotlib

# On OS X:
pip install numpy scipy matplotlib

Set up the cops_and_robots code:

cd ~ # or wherever you'd like to keep this code
git clone https://github.com/COHRINT/cops_and_robots.git
cd cops_and_robots
python setup.py develop

NOTE: You may need to upgrade your easy_install before running python setup.py develop. If it complains, follow the instructions to upgrade easy_install.

NOTE: Running python setup.py develop installs the cops and robots package dependencies, but, until I can find a fix for it, it won't add cops_and_robots to your virtual environment's python path automatically. So, we're fixing it manually:

nano ~/virtual_environments/cops_and_robots/lib/python2.7/site-packages/easy-install.pth

Add /src to the absolute path to the cops and robots directory (in my case, I now have /Users/nick/Downloads/cops_and_robots/src on the third line of my easy-install.pth).

Test out the code:

cd src/cops_and_robots
python main.py