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What is Playful

Playful is a scripting language for complex runtime orchestration of Python API. It is meant for professional roboticists who want to acquire the skill to develop reactive complex behaviors.

On one hand, it is simple. It is a 5 keywords scripting language. On the other hand, it is powerful. It supports:

• encoding of applications in dynamic behavior trees
• mixing of logics (conditional, prioritized and state machine)
• dynamic runtime restructure of the tree and online setup of sensory motor couplings
• encoding of sensory information into discrete scheme systems.

We are happy to get feedback on this tutorial via [email protected]. Merge requests for improvement of this tutorial are also welcomed.

How-to run one of the tutorial

You need a machine installed with ubuntu 64 bits (any version).

The tutorial consists of 10 "sub-tutorials", enumerated from tutorial1 to tutorial10. To each corresponds a playful script that can be executed.

1. download playful executable from playful.is.tuebingen.mpg.de.
2. make the downloaded file executable (in a terminal: 'chmod +x ./playful')
3. the executable does not need installation. Update the $PATH to include the executable (see below).
4. clone this tutorial. In this tutorial, we refer to the directory you clone the tutorial as .
5. in a terminal: go to any of the tutorial folder (e.g.: 'cd /playful_tutorial/tutorial9')
6. in the terminal: run the executable passing "execute" as parameter ('playful execute'). Press 'q' to exit

To update the $PATH

Add the following line in ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=${PATH}:path to the directory which contains the playful executable

Start a new terminal. You can check if things work by typing "playful" in this new terminal. You should see something similar to:

Playful v1.0. Copyright 2015 Vincent Berenz , Copyright 2015-2018 Max Planck Gesellschaft
License information: free of charge exclusively to non-profit organization for use on non-profit projects
Visit: playful.is.tuebingen.mpg.de | support: [email protected]

More information on the $PATH:

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/60218/how-to-add-a-directory-to-the-path
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables#Persistent_environment_variables

How to go through all tutorials

• Visit the tutorial wiki pages, they will display code and information
• On your machine, run the playful executable for each tutorial, as explained in the section above

Requirements

• Ubuntu 64 bits _{(playful executable for other OS may be generated on demand)}
• Any (relatively) recent Python 2.7 should be installed as default Python interpreter. (Python 3 will not work) (this is default on any version of Ubuntu)
• A fair knowledge of Python and Ubuntu

Looking for ROS integration ?

Visit https://github.com/vincentberenz/playful_turtlesim for a concrete interfacing between Playful and ROS.

How to start

We invite you to first try to run the tutorial9 (using the procedure described above) to get an idea where this tutorial goes. tutorial 1

Things not working ?

contact [email protected]