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What is Playful

(For a quick start, jump to the next section)

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. Going through the tutorial should take between 1 and 2 hours.

On one hand, Playful is simple. It has only 5 keywords. On the other hand, Playful is powerful, and manipulates non-trivial concepts:

• 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.

While going through this tutorial, you may at time feel overwhelmed by these new concepts. This is normal. You may then take a step back and realize that all the python code and the playful scripts are actually very short and, once understood, trivial.

If you feel frustrated the code of this tutorial only interfaces only to a trivial toy-robot, please be patient as another advanced tutorial with code for controlling a turtlebot (real or simulated) is under preparation. We also recently started working with Softbank robotics Pepper. Playful libraries for manipulation and navigation are also under preparation. You may also contact [email protected] to ask for tips on how to interface to a real robot.

We advice to get through the scientific paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. This paper gives most the necessary background to understand the scripts used as example in this tutorial. You can find a link to this paper: playful.is.tuebingen.mpg.de

If anything in this tutorial is unclear, we are happy to get feedback on [email protected]. Merge requests for improvement of this tutorial are also welcomed.

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

how-to run one of the tutorial

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. Put this file anywhere in the path. ( to update the $PATH environment variable, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/60218/how-to-add-a-directory-to-the-path or https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables#Persistent_environment_variables in short: add the following line in ~/.bashrc file: export PATH=${PATH}:path to the directory which contains the playful executable and start a new terminal. You can check if things work by typing "playful" in this new terminal )
4. in a terminal: go to any of the tutorial folder (e.g.: 'cd <>/playful_tutorial/tutorial8')
5. in the terminal: run the executable passing "execute" as parameter ('playful execute'). Press 'q' to exit

how to go through all tutorials

following instruction embedded with the code

1. go the directory 'tutorial1'
2. read the README.txt file there
3. this file will redirect you to another file with more info, which will redirect you to another file with more info, etc

using this wiki

• 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

what is needed for the Playful executable to run ?

• Ubuntu
• 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)

things not working ? anything unclear ? more questions ?

contact [email protected]

We hope Playful will be as useful to you as it has been useful to us :)