Software Libraries

Introduction

Listed below are several software libraries that may be useful to you during MASLab. Keep in mind that these are just suggestions, you can feel free to use whatever software you want when developing your robot (if you find any cool libraries, let us know and we'll add them to this list!).

Libraries

• Vision
  • OpenCV (http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/) - An open source library for computer vision. Available for a number of languages.
  • SimpleCV (http://simplecv.org/) - A high-level wrapper around OpenCV for Python. This could be useful if doing simple image processing. One particularly interesting example is detection of a yellow car: http://simplecv.org/learn/examples/parking.html.
• State Machines (it's reasonable to write your own state machine code)
  • Fysom (https://github.com/oxplot/fysom) - A slick FSM implementation that provides function callbacks for each state. (NOTE: Hasn't been looked over, since Github is down at the time of this writing)
  • Skip Montanero's FSM (http://www.smontanaro.net/python/fsm.py) - A simple FSM implementation.
  • Python-Course (http://www.python-course.eu/finite_state_machine.php) - FSM tutorial, including code for a general FSM implementation
• Arduino
  • pySerial (http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/) - If you want to roll your own Arduino communication library, you can simply use pySerial to read/write data from the serial connection. You can find an example on the Arduino site: http://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/Python.