CMSC 422: Project 3 Programming: Non-communicating Multirobot Simluation

• Due: Tuesday May 14 - accepted with no penalty through 11:59PM May 21
  Project will NOT be accepted later than 5/21 without prior approval (and danged good excuse)!

• Description of the project:
  As discussed in class, the performance of a multirobot team may be enhanced, or hurt, by the presence of another robot. You will explore this issue by improving overall team performance through the improvement of specific robots.

  Soccer is a good task for multi-robot investigations. First, it involves cooperation and competition. Second, compared to many robot tasks, performance is easy to measure.

  Your task for this project is to improve the behavior of a heterogeneous robot team.

  To do this you should do the following:

  • Download the teambots simulator from here .
  • Set your CLASSPATH variable as described on that web site (not the way the README says, it may be wrong).
  • Copy the following files from the web to "teambots area"/Domains/teams/ :
    i. BadGoalie.java
    ii. BadPele.java
    iii. robocup.dsc
  • Compile the Bad*.java files.
  • Run "demo" - if this works you are ready to go, if not - get help.

  The "yellow" team is not very good - it has a bad goalie and a horrible key player. You must fix them.

  You can figure out how to improve the code by examining the other robots. You may take pieces of code from any of these you want, but copying an entire player is cheating. (Note, to really do well you'll probably need to take code from a couple of different players and then improve on it).

  If time permits we will have a championship between teams in class (First place gets 10 points extra on final, Second gets 5 point). If you're interested in trying this, we'll need to know by May 14.

• Submission details will be announced in class on May 9. You will definitely need to submit:
  • The source for your Goalie (please give it the name YourNameG.java, where YourName is some clever name).
  • The source for your Attacker (please give it the name YourNamePele.java)
  • Experimental runs:
    • Run the default team (with BadGoalie and BadPele) 5 times (for 2 minute games) against the SchemaDemo team and report the average score as a "baseline."
    • Replace (just) BadGoalie with YourNameG and run 5 times, report the average score.
    • Replace (just) BadPele with YourNamePele and run 5 times, report the average score.
    • Replace both BadGoalie and BadPele with your players, and run run 5 times and report the average score.
  • A write up with the following:
    i. A roughly 1 page (each) description of each of your two players in terms of what it does and how you developed it (i.e. describe its performance in English and also desribe what code you took from other teams (which is okay) and how you modified it).
    ii. A results section that reports the results of the experimental runs (each game and averages)
    iii. A conclusions section that describes (1 page enough) why you got the results you did, and what you might do to improve things if you had more time, energy, java ability and/or knowledge of robotics.

• Your grade will be determined, in order of significance, by:
  • The performance of your team with both players substituted. Your team outplaying the SchemaDemo team will result in at least a B.
  • The creativity of your solution. You may base your team on existing code, but your team should include some kind of clever improvement, not just a change of parameters.
  • Your analysis of why your team performs better (or worse) than the baseline.

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