Robot Simulator

Description

This application is completed as a task following this brief. The result is a simulation of a toy robot moving on a square tabletop, of dimensions 5 units x 5 units.

Requirements

Though Python on most desktop platforms should behave the same, it may be worth noting that the application was developed on Mac OS X 10.9.4 and tested using Python 2.7.5. The application is compatible with the following versions.

Python >= 2.6.5

To check your version run:

$ python --version

Installation

To install the application and be able to use robotsimulator from command line, invoke

$ python setup.py install

or alternatively you can simply run the application file without installing (see Usage below)

Usage

A sequence of commands can be fed into the simulation to interact with the toy robot such as moving, turning or reporting location.

• PLACE X,Y,F will put the toy robot on the table in position X,Y and facing NORTH, SOUTH, EAST or WEST.
• MOVE will move the toy robot one unit forward in the direction it is currently facing.
• LEFT and RIGHT will rotate the robot 90 degrees in the specified direction without changing the position of the robot.
• REPORT will announce the X,Y and F of the robot.

Notes

• The origin (0,0) can be considered to be the SOUTH WEST most corner.
• The first valid command to the robot is a PLACE command, after that, any sequence of commands may be issued, in any order, including another PLACE command. The application will discard all commands in the sequence until a valid PLACE command has been executed

Examples

a)
PLACE 0,0,NORTH
MOVE
REPORT
Output: 0,1,NORTH

b)
PLACE 0,0,NORTH
LEFT
REPORT
Output: 0,0,WEST

c)
PLACE 1,2,EAST
MOVE
MOVE
LEFT
MOVE
REPORT
Output: 3,3,NORTH

Running simulation

The application can either accept commands from STDIN through interactive mode or from an input file where there is one command per line.

When installed

In interactive mode:

$ robotsimulator

With input file:

$ cat /path/to/input | robotsimulator

When not installed

In interactive mode:

$ python /path/to/repo/robot_simulator

With input file:

$ cat /path/to/input | python /path/to/repo/robot_simulator

Testing

Prerequisites

The nose testing library is a prerequisite for running this application's unit tests and will have to be installed. The easiest way is running the following with pip if it is installed, which installs all the test prerequisites.

$ pip install -r /path/to/repo/requirements-test.txt

More information can be found here https://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Running unit tests

With nose installed, navigate to the repo directory and run

$ nosetests