Stoolbotics

A beginner friendly, minimalistic and open source robot arm simulator I wrote in python for a robotics class back in 2012. Stoolbotics is designed to be a general purpose arm and kinematics simulator aimed at being a teaching tool for aspiring roboticists.

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Linear algebra and mathematical concepts behind robotics are difficult for a beginners without any visual context. This is especially true for people who are primarily visual learners (like me). This tool will hopefully fill a gap in education environments where robotics is being taught.

Stoolbotics (right) simulating a phantom omni (left).

Features

Stoolbotics has many features that make it attractive to the aspiring roboticist and the robotics education classroom:

• An easy to use / understand file format for specifying a robot arm
• Ability to visualize any robot that can be specified in such a file
• Compute the forward kinematics of any robot from DH parameters
• Command line interface within simulator with many useful commands
• Customizable simulation environment
  • Animate and draw paths for arms
  • Control time-stepping
  • Change variables in the simulator on the fly
• Record / playback simulator activity
• MATLAB compatible
  • Import a recording generated in MATLAB
  • Able drive simulator in real time from a UDP stream (includes an example of this)
• Built in help from simulator command line and comprehensive documentation
• Cross platform implementation

Links

• How to get Stoolbotics: download page
• Source code on github
• Quickstart of how to use Stoolbotics: quickstart
• Full documentation: full docs.