Playarea

A planar minimal robot simulator. A simulated differential-drive robot lives on a metric occupancy-grid map and is driven over a small TCP/UDP network protocol, with a Python client and a browser-based map editor alongside it.

Quick start

Install the simulator and its Python client from PyPI:

pip install playarea

Launch the simulator (opens control on TCP port 9000):

playarea run sim

playarea exposes a small command tree:

playarea run sim          # the 3D robot simulator (also the default: bare `playarea`)
playarea run map-editor   # the map editor in a native window
playarea run --help       # list available targets

Bare playarea (and any simulator flags, e.g. playarea --tcp_port 9001) still launches the simulator, so existing usage keeps working. Pass playarea run map-editor --no-window to serve the editor to your browser instead of opening a native window.

Then drive the robot from Python:

from playarea import Robot

with Robot() as robot:              # connects to localhost:9000
    robot.set_speed(v=0.2, w=0.5)   # linear m/s, angular rad/s

    robot.subscribe_odom()
    print(robot.odom)               # latest Odometry(x, y, theta, v, w, seq, t)

Documentation

📚 hassan.umari.dev/playarea

• Map Editor — design and export occupancy maps in the browser.