GSoC 2018: Multiple Robots in Simulation (Before First Evaluation)

[Akshat Khare]

Hi everyone,

I am Akshat Khare, and I am doing Google Summer of Code with Open Roberta Lab this year (2018).

I am working on the project: Multiple robots in simulation

Project: To add the feature of multiple simulations for Calliope, EV3 and NXT The Open Roberta® Lab provides ​a simulation, where users can test their programs without a real robot. Currently, the simulation only supports one board. I am going to extend it in such a way that it is possible to simulate the behaviour of two or more robots. Firstly I would be aiming to do the multiple simulations for the EV3 robot. Having done that I would similarly be doing multiple simulations for Calliope and NXT.

Here is the proposal for the project which was accepted.

I have been allotted Kostadin and Beate as my mentors. Under their able mentorship and support of Evgeniya and Stephan, I have been able to complete my task for first evaluation which is of developing the UI for multiple simulations of robots. UI consists of popups containing the table for user to select the programs to be run simultaneously. My major time till the first evaluation has been devoted to understanding the codebase in details as my project has its roots in almost every part of the project. Having getting pretty comfortable with the codebase, I am not facing many difficulties in the coding part. I am currently working on the simulation logic for the project.

Here is a video I prepared and uploaded to YouTube demonstrating the use case of the project. My code can be seen at my fork on GitHub.

I have also decided to contribute to the documentation of the Software and am writing my learnings in a document which I will use later to contribute to the wiki and documentation of the software. Here is the link to the document, you can also add your suggestions and facts about the software in this document.

Until my first evaluation, I have learnt much cool stuff about JavaServer based web application. This is my first venture in JSP framework, Jetty server-based application and using Eclipse for development. I have learnt about the amazing capabilities of javascript, its asynchronous behaviour and how to exploit it efficiently. I also got acquainted with Model-View-Controller (MVC) Framework, Module Based structures of files and loading them with javascript for bringing modularity to the structure of the code. I also learnt about many other things like JAXB, JavaServer, etc. which are mentioned in the document above and many things that are not mentioned in the document. It has been a period of great learning, and I am looking forward to learning more cool stuff and contributing more to the Organisation (also after my project gets completed) and make the Software better for everyone ( both users and developers).