ARS 0.5b1

ARS: Autonomous Robot Simulator
===============================


.. image:: https://pypip.in/d/ARS/badge.png
:target: https://crate.io/packages/ARS/

ARS is a physically-accurate robotics simulator written in Python.
It's main purpose is to help researchers to develop mobile
manipulators and, in general, any multi-body system. It
is open-source, modular, easy to learn and use,
and can be a valuable tool in the process
of robot design, in the development of control and reasoning algorithms, as
well as in teaching and educational activities.

..
It will encompass a wide range of tools spanning from kinematics and dynamics
simulation to robot interfacing and control.

ARS uses
`Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) <https://sourceforge.net/projects/opende/>`_
as physics engine, and
`Visualization Toolkit (VTK) <http://www.vtk.org/>`_
as graphics engine.
While both are well regarded and popular open-source software,
ARS was designed to minimize coupling with them
(through included abstraction layers)
to let developers experiment with other alternatives.


Installation
-----------------------------

Because ARS is ``pip``-compatible,
it's very easy to install, upgrade and uninstall it:

.. code-block:: bash

$ pip install ARS
$ pip install --upgrade ARS
$ pip uninstall ARS

While that's the recommended way to go, you may still follow
the old-fashion procedure: download the file, unpack and run

.. code-block:: bash

$ python setup.py install


Requirements
^^^^^^^^^^^^

ARS needs:

* Python 2.6 or 2.7
* ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) 0.12 with Python bindings
* VTK (Visualization Toolkit) 5.8 with Python bindings
* NumPy 1.6

ODE and VTK can be somewhat complicated to install, depending on your OS.

For detailed installation instructions (ARS and requirements)
and troubleshooting, see the
`online documentation <http://ars-project.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation/>`_.


Documentation
-------------

The documentation is hosted at
`ReadTheDocs.org <http://ars-project.readthedocs.org>`_
and it is generated dynamically after each commit to the repository.


License
-------

This software is licensed under the OSI-approved "BSD License". To avoid
confusion with the original BSD license from 1990, the FSF refers to it as
"Modified BSD License". Other names include "New BSD", "revised BSD", "BSD-3",
or "3-clause BSD".

See the included LICENSE.txt file.


Tests
-----

To run the included test suite you need more packages (``tox`` and ``mock``):

.. code-block:: bash

~/ars$ pip install -r requirements_test.txt
~/ars$ tox