Douglas Blank just sent this to edu-sig. I want to use PyPy to control Robots. Just think of the demos we could make! :-)
Laura In a message of Tue, 21 Mar 2006 12:58:55 EST, "Douglas S. Blank" writes: >On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 11:57 -0500, Arthur wrote: > >[snip] > >> I am of course thinking whether I have been knee-jerk in bringing Numer >ic >> into play as a fundamental tool for my application. >> >> Which I why I then move on to trying to get serious about gaining some >> profiling skills. Gain some intelligence about the trade-offs of doing > the >> kind of simple linear algebra my application requires in pure Python, v >ersus >> what I may gaining by the creepy calls to laplack. >> >> Judgment calls need to be made in the end, but I take them seriously en >ough >> to want them to be informed judgment calls. > >I've been wrestling with these issues. I've built a Python robotics 2D >simulator in 99% Python, 1% Numeric. It works amazingly well: fast >enough and realistic enough to do the job. The robot can have sonar, IR, >and bumpers; lights, and light bulbs; a 2D camera with pan-zoom, and a >gripper to pick up things. The world has some simple physics (bump a >puck head-on and it will slide, with some friction). > >Then I extended it to be a 3D simulator. Still, amazingly, fast enough >and realistic enough to do the job. > >On the one hand, I like all of the source code to be accessible to the >student. We say that it is "Pythons all the way down". And that also >makes it portable. But on the other hand, it has to run fast enough. > >We are able to do it all in Python, expect for the nitty gritty vision >and image processing code, which we use SWIG and C++. > >I did some profiling, and was surprised at where some of the time was >spent. (This simulator is also controlled over sockets, so I had some >additional items to speed up). But, was able to refactor some, and get >some very substantial speedup, just in the Python portion. castRay() is >still the most expensive bit in Python. > >I am also looking at IronPython for .NET and Mono, and am wondering how >much I can get in one layer (without going to C/C++) and how fast it >will be... > >Here are some pictures: > >http://pyrorobotics.org/?page=The_20Pyrobot_20Simulator > >-Doug > >> No conclusions as yet. >> >> Art >-- >Douglas S. Blank Computer Science >Assistant Professor Bryn Mawr College >(610)526-6501 http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dblank >_______________________________________________ >Edu-sig mailing list >[email protected] >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev
