Webots User Guide

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Foreword

Thanks

1.Installing Webots

2.Upgrading from Webots 2

3.Getting Started with Webots

4.Tutorial: Modelling and simulating your robot

5.Robot and Supervisor Controllers

6.Tutorial: Using the KheperaTM robot

7.ALife Contest

     

7.5 Developers' Tips and Tricks

This section contains some hints to develop efficiently an intelligent robot controller.

7.5.1 Practical issues

The ALife0 example program display a Java image for showing the viewpoint of the camera, after some image processing. This is pretty computer expensive and you may speed up the simulation by disabling this display, which should be used only for debug. By the way, during contest matches, the Java security manager is set so that your Java controller cannot open a window or display anything.

7.5.2 Java Security Manager

To avoid cheating or viruses, a Java security manager is used for contest matches ran by the automatic contest supervisor. This security manager will prevent your Java controller from opening any window, opening any file for writing or reading and doing any networking stuff.

7.5.3 Levels of Intelligence

It is possible to distinguish a number of level in the complexity of the control algorithms. These level can be ranked as follow:

  1. The robot is able to move and avoid obstacles. However, it does not use the camera information at all and will find chargers only by chance. This correspond to the ALife0 controller.

  2. In addition to level 1, the robot is able to recognize if a full charger is in front of it, even far away. In this case, it will be able to adjust its movement to reach the charger if not obstacles are on the way. Otherwise, the robot will look into another direction for chargers.

  3. In addition to level 2, the robot is able to move around obstacles preventing a movement towards a full charger.

  4. In addition to level 3, the robot is able to perform an almost complete exploration of the world, reaching places difficult to reach for simpler robots (you will rapidely notice that some places are more difficult to reach than others, the problem is that these places may contain chargers...).

  5. In addition to level 4, the robot is able to build a map of its environment (mapping), so that once a charger is found, it is placed on the map, thus faciliting the procedure for finding it back. After completing the map, the robot can efficiently navigate between chargers without loosing time to search for them.

  6. In addition to level 5, the robot tries to chase its opponent, blocking it, preventing it to reach chargers or emptying chargers just before it arrives.

During the previous editions of the contest, the best competitors reached level 4 (and even one reached level 5 after the contest ended). We believe that reaching level 5 or 6 may lead to significant performance improvements and probably to the first place of the hall of fame...

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