Pyro: A Python robotics simulator

Just saw this cool new project while I was browsing robots.net. Looks like somebody has built (thanks to a National Science Foundation grant) a Python robotics API. Pyro includes simulation of various mainstream robot chassis, as well as access to the gazebo 3d environment robot simulator.

The great thing here is that you can quickly simulate a robot, without writing a ton of C code up front. I have long preferred Python for quickly mocking up programs, but recently I have been finding that there is no real reason to go any further than the mockup. The Python programs are usually fast enough (and very easy to extend with a little bit of C if they are not), and avoid the usual buffer overflow, memory leak, and other misc C related debugging issues.