Tools
This course makes use of Athena, MIT's UNIX-based computing environment. OCW does not provide access to this environment.
Software
In this course, we'll be using the Python programming language. We'll also be using a Python package called soar to control the robots, both the real ones and in simulation. The soar program was written for 6.01 by Michael Haimes with help from Ross Glashan. It was originally inspired by a platform called PyRo that is used for robot programming at several schools.
You'll also need an editor and/or development environment for writing and debugging your programs. This term, we will be using idle, a programming environment specially designed for Python programming and included with the Python distribution. It's also possible to use Emacs for homework, if you prefer, although we'd like you to use idle in lab. If you do use Emacs, we suggest that you use the latest version, Emacs 22, which comes with built-in support for Python programming. The idle environment is easier to use if all you want to do is to write and run simple Python programs for this class. Emacs is a powerful real-time display editor that you can use for Python and lots of other text-processing and programming applications.
Thursday labs will be done by students working in pairs, using lab laptops that connect to the robots. Tuesday software labs will be done individually using either your own laptop, a lab laptop, or a lab Athena machine. Homework can be done on your own laptop or an Athena machine. If you wish to use your own laptop for software lab or homework, it will need to have Python, idle and soar installed on it.
Installing the 6.01 Software on Your Own Computer
You can use use GNU/Linux, Windows, or MacOS, as you prefer. The installation instructions are different for the different operating systems. Please look at the instructions even if you have all this installed already, so that you have the correct versions of the software. In particular, make sure you are running Python version 2.6, not 2.3 or 2.4 or 2.5 or 3.0:
Infrastructure Guide
This guide describes how to use robots, circuit elements, soar, and CMax (PDF - 1.0MB).
