RoboSoccer UCD

Deadlines Have come and passed so how did the project go?

2009-05-19T04:28:00.000-07:00

As I write this it has been a week since I submitted my project. What was achieved? Originally it was envisaged that this project would lead to the making of an Agent Factory based RoboCup Team. This task proved to be very optimistic considering the approach that I took. What has been produced is in fact a framework which can be added to in the future. The basic framework is there now for me or anybody else to carry on the project. All that is required is some AI for the players. This team will never be a successful a RoboCup until a few issues are addressed. Firstly synchronization in Agent Factory is quite tough to do and this would need to be looked into by Rem to see how best to change Agent Factory to accommodate this. The next thing is a Coach although while not necessary some AI methods may require the information it could provide. However if you feel like having a go at making a team the source code for the framework as well as the Project Report will be up on www.agentfactory.com in the coming weeks.

Seriously WTF!!!!!

2009-04-25T05:17:00.000-07:00

So the parser was breaking when i saw other players which was funny as it showed a problem with the parser for everything i need to offset the token iterator by +1 so as to land on the right part of the array :(

Very Impressed with Rem and Agent Factory

2009-04-22T15:28:00.000-07:00

So first off big thanks to my Supervior Dr Rem Collier he was superb today at getting me sorted with agent factory. We now have 22 agents on the pitch in agent factory shame they don;t really have a brain :P Anyways bed is calling much to be done tomorrow think i'll help my agent know where exactly they are.

Location System Update

2009-04-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

Have all the see objects stored in the format i want just playing around with priority queues at the minute and as soon as they are fixed the location system should be up and running.

Mutli Threaded success

2009-04-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

Woot Woot success I have my threaded client done I can now decode and send commands at the same time.

Networking solved

2009-04-12T04:45:00.000-07:00

So I was trying to get my player to send commands to the server other than the init ones when I stumbled across an issue I had not yet encountered. A brief search of the news file and it turns out soccer server uses a dedicated socket for each client. A simple packet.getPort() command on the first packet I receive from the server after I initialise the client resolved the issue so my client is now on the pitch. I need to make the multi threaded client so as I can move around a bit. In good news the clients parser is working great. Need to get the location nailed down now and it will be a good day.

Think i have cracked my location system

2009-04-07T04:43:00.000-07:00

So after many pieces of paper I have the outline for my location system. I need to keep track of my head and body angle and then using these angles I can then calculate mine and an object I see location via triangulation. Again several conditionals will be needed to drive this system. Eg is the reference point on a sideline or an endline. is it too the left of centre or right of center etc. Gonna draw them up now and then write the sudo code and then implement the code. Wish me luck. Just need to decide whether its easier to locate the seen object using me as the refernece essentially the 0,0 then translating the vlaues into world co-ordinates or if I should just try get world co-ords from the object striaght away. Suppose a little more maths is called for :(

So how do I want to view the world

2009-03-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

My head is melted at the minute trying to decide how I want my players to see the world. I suppose for simpleness I should just use some form of priority queue for players and pass to the closest player or shoot at goal whichever is possible at the present time but my mind keeps thinking about 3-4 steps from where I am at the minute. Think i just need to make a client that can actually kick a ball by himself and worry about the more complex stuff later on in the week.

Parser Bug FIXED

2009-03-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

Finally found the problem preventing me from fully using the parser. Firstly I never accounted for the initial value in my big splitter method so I was getting an out of bounds exception so I just start to extract info from position 1 in the array of tokens rather than position 0 which had the type of command the server had sent in there. Once that was sorted I stumbled across another error as I use string.startswith("blah blah") in certain cases I would have a class where I was checking to see if a token began with blah and then with blah blah so it would never get to the blah blah part. Anyways nesting the two into one check worked great and so now my parser is fully done

Exams are comin :(

2009-03-16T04:40:00.000-07:00

So i did my interim report about 2 weeks ago and at the minute i'm doing exams. From the end of next week on though it will be all project all the time till the May 7th deadline. I best get my coding hat on so.

Interim Report Update

2009-02-27T18:20:00.001-08:00

Met Rem today got 4 previous interim reports off him seems a very managable report. Rem want roughly 2 page intro 2 pages on agents 2 pages on agent factory and 2 pages on soccer server. Then 2 pages on What my plan for the rest of the project is. Limited to 10 pages :( Could do with more space.

Triangulation - whoever invented it deserves a medal

2009-02-27T18:16:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation what a superb site. Have been wondering how to get a decent method of locating my agents on the soccer pitch and have know the answer lay in trigonometry and after much looking I happened upon this gem of a wiki page that answered all my questions. Woot woot now to fix the parsers bugs so I can proceed to getting my locating on

Interim Report Time :(

2009-02-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

So since I last blogged a few things have happened. I have finished the text parser just doing the debugging now. I'm working on agent location and movements at the minute. Trying to find out how to best locate the player in the world. Other than that no real concrete progress has been made. I have to admit to a little bit of slacking off and doing other assignments rather than project work. Had a meeting with Rem a week or two ago where we talked about the agent and how we would like to do things was good took some good notes. We talked about how the project is more complicated than we first thought but hopefully I can lay a good foundation to enable some other student to take a crack at making a more complex agent team next year. Showed Rem how the server works and all in all a good meeting was had. Have one tomorrow. Interim report is due next Friday so the plan is to find out what goes into one tomorrow and then do a first draft over the weekend. Supposed to be 10 pages will easily fill that quota. Could fill 10 pages talking about the Soccer Server ffs. Project has turned out to be very complex. By committing to building my own implementation of things like the message parser etc I have taken on a lot of work some of which is very complicated. Hopefully once I get the report out of the way March will prove to be a more productive month. Plan at the minute is to get a draft of the reort done by Monday and sort out the text parser once and for all over the weekend. Gotta get all the kinks ironed out.

Needed SVN or CVS now i have both!!

2009-02-07T07:46:00.000-08:00

SO i needed to get some svn or cvs on to backup my code and also to allow me to work on it on my tiptop in windows and linux and not need to do stupid usb backups. So i set up a Surce Fordge account and registered my project. Source Fordge gave me access to cvs woot woot. 20 mins after i had been given cvs by Source Fordge my Supervisor emailed me and said i could now use the svn that agent factory has on source fordge. So the plan now is to use my cvs for my random test code and the agent factory svn for what i would call propper code backup. Eg stuff that works and not little test programs designed for experimentation purposes.

I love Binary Chop :D

2009-02-05T13:02:00.001-08:00

So i finally tackled the big "server_param" message. It contains 153 variables so my first approach was to just make 153 if/else statements and use a for loop and the java string splitter as mentioned before. This turned out to be 11,781 operations which is not good. I'm sure it would work but i couldn't leave it like that so i decided to use binary chop and then sort by most occurences. This has brought the parsing down to at most 20*153 which is 3060 opperations but as this is worst case and we have sorted according to higher occurances it will be signifigantly less which is a saving of a lot of opperations. I'm sure i could get this down to 153 operations but my current method will allow for my method to be easily adjusted to handle future "server_param" messages which may have been reordered or even extended. Just have to get the "see" and "sense_body" game time messages done now, I am going to look into recursion for them as they need to be uber fast.

Soooo how exactly do i move and Stuff?????

2009-02-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

So it would appear that this week I have again delayed my basic agent factory agent making (really need to start doing that soon) and have instead decided on looking into how people make players do stuff lick dribble and pass to a team mate. My current approach is to make all the Java methods to do these basic and non basic movements so that when its time to agent it up I can just use them as actuators in my agent factory agent. One of the perks of how agent factory is designed may I add. Anyways off I go to see how other people have approached my task.

Synchronization

2009-01-28T09:06:00.000-08:00

So I've been wondering about this for a while as to how I can get my agent to not send to many messages to the server and I have been reading a masters thesis of Remco de Boer & Jelle Kok who made the team UvA Trilearn and they have gone into great detail as to how to do this. They have all sorts of timed tests and they examine all the pitfalls of each. Its very clever, I might check out more thesis' mentioned in this thesis but at the minute I would be fairly happy with using one of the two approached they have out lined. It seems most people who are trying to make there team recommend using UvA Trilearn as a basis for low level stuff such as kicking dribbling etc; and then putting your own high level AI on top of it. So I'm going to use them as a base for making my agent factory agents work. Just a little note for myself Chapter 5 of the thesis for the Synchronization stuff its all highlighted :P

All not going well :(

2009-01-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

So i have been messing around trying to make a Java client and i have message splitting and command construction down. I have yet to make them all play nice. I have just found out where to find out about all the latest updates for the soccer server it is located in the NEWS file that comes bundled with the install. I plan to review this take not of all changes and then see where I go. I think I need to take baby steps and ignore stuff like complex location calculations and what not and focus on getting 11 clients to run around and kick the ball to each other. I'm getting lost in all the flashy difficult things that I will require later. In other news I seriously need to get the finger out over the next two weeks.

A splitting SUCCESS :)

2009-01-04T05:44:00.001-08:00

So I have now managed to split the server messages using the string split method. Was relatively painless as once I described how the messages were to be split the split command worked flawlessly. My next problem is to make a splitter for every type of message the server sends. I also need to examine if my current approach will provide me with enough performance when in full use in my client program. I think I shall do some timed stress tests.

Regular Expression :'(

2008-12-30T17:24:00.000-08:00

So I have decide to make a start on things I currently am trying to make a command parser for the server outputs which has led me to having to try and remember regular expression(lets just say it wasn't one of my favourite subjects covered in college) as it would appear that a string tokeniser using regular expression is the most efficient way Java has of breaking up long strings of words. Oh I have also made a little program that connects to the server initialises itself as a player and then listens for server commands/outputs. Once i get the tokeniser part working as well and all possible server outputs properly parsed and stored i plan to move onto Agent Factory and make an AFAPL implementation of my Java program.

In other good news I have finally gotten around to reading the book chapter Rem gave me I shall post a little review /explanation of it after I re read it so that it sinks in a bit more.

Instalation SUCCESS!!!!

2008-12-28T09:27:00.000-08:00

Well Christmas day has come and gone and my exams are finally over so I had no excuses left for putting of installing all the software need for the project. I made a fresh ubuntu install set up Sun Java and Netbeans, added the Agent Factory plugin to netbeans and installed the 2D Soccer Server. I went with the 2D version for a few reasons one being that I presumed it would require less resources to run and two being that the 3D instructions on the soccer server wiki seem to be out of date :(

Anyway all is well in the land of Dave and Linux. Now I just need to make an agent talk to the server. Let the FUN begin.

Page I used to install the 2D Soccer Server
http://sserver.wiki.sourceforge.net/Install_2D

Page I used to install the Agent Factory Plugin for Netbeans
http://www.agentfactory.com/index.php/Netbeans_Plugin

Meeting with Rem

2008-11-14T03:10:00.000-08:00

So i had another meeting with Rem the other day and i must say i found it really cool to sit there and just throw ideas back and forth. Granted my current agent factory knowledge is not up to expert levels but my understanding of how AOPL works has come along to where i can now understand how it works.

We discussed several aspects of the project and i now have a clearer picture of what is needed regarding the later parts of the project but for now i am focusing on simple baby steps.

In the coming weeks i am hoping to do some diagrams to help show what way the project is going to be structured so fingers crossed.

A couple of notes from the meeting.
1) I need to contact Dave Lillis and get set up as a poster to the agent factory wiki
2) I need to get Netbeans and install agent factory and get that working
3) I need to begin to get an agent made that can talk to the SoccerServer.
4) I need to read the newer soccer server manual
5) I need to register for the RoboSoccer mailing list and fire off a few mails to find out all the new improvements to SoccerServer as my current manual is dated 2003
6) I need to read the book chapter Rem gave me
7) I need to read the SoSAA paper
8) I need to set up SVN on Agent Factorys sourceforge

A couple of other important things that came up that i want to note for future reference. The time criticalness of the SoccerServer clients may cause problems later on as agent factory is single thread thus if i have 12 agents and a 400ms cycles each agent only gets roughly 33ms of CPU time. Serveral solutions to this were bounced around during the meeting. I suggested maybe turning off agents when they aren't needed eg the goalie isn't needed if we are attacking so savings like that may help. Also using pure java classes/methods to refine/improve performance in critical parts of the agents programming. Rem even said he would consider making refinements to agent factory so that it was more focused on RoboSoccer/time critical agent based systems. He said he could go back to an earlier version of agent factory that was multi-threaded although he said they found this to be slower than single thread but for my needs it may actually prove faster. Again this is all just being jotted down for later reference.

We also discussed SoSAA which is a method that allowes us to merge CBSE and AOSE ideas. More on this after read the paper rem gave me. Basically CBSE is good at low-level stuff and AOSE is good at high level stuff and S0SAA is a way or merging the aspects of both approaches eg Componets and Agents. But like i said more on this later.

Also Rem was very cool for suggesting that we may release some of my stuff on the agent factory wiki when it is a viable/useful tool.

So that all for now i have a tonne of college work due between now and the end of term I'll cross off what i get done form the list when i get it done and hopefully i can start to make a bit of progress between now and the end of January.

Agent Factory ON HOLD

2008-11-04T04:09:00.000-08:00

Yeah so i've been really busy and will be for the next couple of weeks with course work. If i get some free time between now and christmas i'll blog about it but don't expect anything new till the new year :(

Agent Factory is GO!!!!!!!

2008-10-23T04:42:00.001-07:00

So I've moved onto researching Agent Factory and Agent Oriented Programming or AOP for short. Rem has provided me with a few starter texts so let the reading begin :)

Review finally finished!!

2008-10-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

So i spent most of last night and this morning re reading the manual and making sure i knew what was required for the various agents. I have compiled a brief introduction which i have forwarded onto my supervisor to see if we can now proceed with the brain storming session or if he feels more information is required for the introduction.

Car Park meeting with Rem

2008-10-18T05:13:00.001-07:00

So i've been a bit busy with other course work for the past week or so and have neglectied my RoboSoccer a lot.

Was walking to the car on thursday and ran into Rem. Firstly i appologied for not being in contact with him in a while but what followed was a conversation that put to bed my fears about agent factory. Rem said that all the java methods that i planned to use in a purely java based client can be integrated into an agent factory agent. The agent will do the dicision process and then call on the java methods to actually do what it wants. Must get a propper diagram drawn up over the next week or so and post it here as a record of the planned structure of the agent.

My three goals for the coming weeks are
1 - Finish reading the manual and prepare the document for rem
2 - Get the simulators up and running and play with them
3 - Get a diagram of the structure of the agents programming done

SoccerServer Overview / project update

2008-09-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

Right so having read the first few chapters of the manual i just wanted to post a more concrete general overview of the soccersever program.

- Client -- Server Interaction
- Each Team is made up of 11 induvidual clients
- Comunicate via UDP/IP protocols
- Inter-Client Communication via Server only using talk commands
- Server Provides all low level functions e.g., Walk,turn,run,kick,stamina,vision
- Client is basically just a football players brain

Following on from a meeting with Rem i'm going to produce a paper with an overview of the soccerserver system. This will then be distributed to some experts in the college and Rem is going to organise a brain storming session. Hopefully we can then find a way to use Agent Factory in the making of the various clients required to make a team.

Simulator Woo's

2008-09-25T02:58:00.000-07:00

So it would appear that i don't need to compare and contrast the simulators. They respond to the same commands and only offer different views of the game graphically. The simulators it appears do everything like walking, kicking, visual field, and a host of other things. I have to communicate with it through UDP protocols. I can then send instructions to the players in the simulators and they can also report back to me there current state e.g., where they are, how much energy they have, who is near them etc. Now i need to read this 120page manual in dept and extract the available commands and messages the simulator offers.

First Meeting

2008-09-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

So i had an unplanned but very productive meeting with my project supervisor Rem. He explains the bones of the the design of agent based technology. He showed me the stack like representation which i have to draw out. My first goal is to compare and analysis the 2d and 3d simulators. Only downside to this is it looks like I'll have to live in Linux to do this project :'(

Welcome

2008-09-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

This is a blog setup to record my progress with my 4th year project.