CustomizingRobots

Prev: The Worldsim Library	Up: Home	Next: Wheeled robots

Table of contents

• How to use and configure the Robots

How to use and configure the Robots

FARSA provides a series of robotic models (i.e. Khepera, ePuck, MarxBot, and iCub) that are ready to use. In your experiment, however, you might need to define how the position and orientation of the robot is initialized at the beginning of each trial. Moreover, you might need to access to the robots' state to perform analisys or to evaluate the robots' performance. In this section we explain how you can do that.

For each robot you will find two different classes, one with the same name of the robot (e.g. Khepera, Epuck, ...) and another one whose name is prefixed with Phy (e.g. PhyKhepera, PhyEpuck, ...). The Phy classes are the physical model of the robot and contain all the phsical objects, joints and low-level motors and sensors. The other classes are the component associated with robots. Components expose most of the corresponding robot properties as configuration parameters. For example it is possible to specify whether FARSA should use a kinematic or dynamic mode to simulate the movements of the robots and the effect of the physical interaction between the robots and the environment (the dynamic simulation, which is the default value of the parameter, is much more accurate but also much more computationally expensive). Robot components can be used in the ROBOT subgroup of Experiment when using an EvoRobotExperiment component. In this case it is also possible to specify the number of robots that you want to use, as illustrated below.

[Component/GA/Experiment]
ntrials = 3
nsteps = 2000
nagents = 10

[Component/GA/Experiment/ROBOT]
type = Khepera
kinematicRobot = true

The initial position and the orientation of the robot in the environment, should be specified in the source code of the experimental plugin as explained in the wheeled robots and in the iCub robot pages.