Ciber-Mouse Simulation Environment is built as a
distributed system. The distributed system is composed by several
independent processes: a simulator, the robotic agents and a graphical
front-end. The simulator is responsible for creating and controlling the
virtual world where competition takes place, it creates the labyrinth and
the virtual bodies of robots. The robotic agents are developed by the
competitors and are the “brains” of the robots, each agent controlling the
body of a robot. The graphical front-end provides the visualisation and
control tools. These processes communicate through UDP sockets which are
used to send XML messages.
Competitors have to develop a program (the robotic
agent) that receives sensor data and controls robot movement acting on the
motors. Sensors and motors are subject to noise, so agents have to deal with
it. Competitors can choose the programming language and the operating system
they most like to develop their agents. The organization provides
communication libraries for some popular programming languages (C/C++, Java,
Visual Basic and Prolog).
