Re: Movement creation and sharing...

Hi Jean-Phillippe,
I really like the new contest site and I think that your motion interface designed at helping newcomers is a very good idea. I would be really happy if I can help you doing that, and I am sure that a lot of competitors have very interesting tools to share.
Concerning the web site, I think that a very important improvement would be to give competitors the opportunity to run an "off contest" game on the server. I have had some problems this year because the behavior of my robot was a bit different on the contest server and on my local machine, probably because I'm a bad windows user, I've heard that this problem doesn't occur when using linux ;-). It was generally not much to change but the only feedback I could get was the replay of my robot's match, so it often took me a few days to debug my robot, where as running an off contest game directly on the server would give the possibility to adapt the robot to the server conditions before updating it.
Moreover, these off contest games would give to any robot the opportunity to play against any other one, and hence have different training partners other than his clone ( same robot in Judoka0 and Judoka1 at home ) : I suppose a lot of competitors have like me more or less optimized their controller to play against himself ;-)  There would not be any class sharing problem since the .class would never leave the server, and if many competitors want to run a game on the server at the same time there should be a queue system or something like that. It would also give the opportunity to anyone coming on the site for the first time when the contest is not running to run a match by curiosity and not only watch a static image. Of course these training games should be disabled during the real contest matches in the afternoon. What do you think of that?
Congratulations to Bob !!!!
Xavier




Hi,
> 
> As mentioned before I’ve been working on the new site for the next judoka
> competition (http://roboka.org). Now the site more or less finished I can focus
> again on creating useful tools for the competitors. The goal I set my self is to
> produce a movement creation tool witch enables competitors to easily create, use
> and share their movements. The base lines are already defined and I would
> greatly appreciate some collaboration and remarks from all of you and especially
> Xavier (Kubiak). I will not give the full spec yet, but I want to present the
> basic Idea. My project is composed of three main parts:
> 
> 
> 1. Movement definition
> 
> I’m trying to create a very general usable Motion java object. The idea is to
> have a movement defined by a list of key-frames (position/time couples) for each
> servo involved in the movement. Once the motion object created, each time the
> motion will be used it has to be initialised (MyMotion.init(int time) where time
> is the start time) and can then be used by sending the actual time to it. The
> main program fully controls the movement and can choose to abort it a any time
> (The object only returns the servo values but doesn’t send them to the servos).
> There will be other feature but I don’t want to go to far in details. I am
> thinking of defining a Java Interface witch these motion objects have to follow
> so if people are not happy with my implementation of the interpolation etc. they
> can just do it by themselves.
> 
> 
> 2. File sharing using XML.
> 
> This part is greatly inspired by the wiki contribution done by Albathor for the
> last year’s competition. The idea is to define the motion object described in
> point 1. in a separate human readable xml file witch will be parsed at the
> launch of the controller. The parser I have almost finished will create the
> motion objects, which can then be accessed by the controllers. The xml file will
> look something like this:
> 
> 
> 
> back_one .1 .2 0
> back_oneFrameNumber 0 40 50
> 
> back_two 0 .5 .3
> back_twoFrameNumber 0 70 120
> 
> left_hip_one 0
> left_hip_oneFrameNumber 0
> 
> left_hip_two 0
> left_hip_twoFrameNumber 0
> 
> left_hip_three 0 .4
> left_hip_threeFrameNumber 0 20
> 
> 
> 
> 
> …
> …
> 
> 
> 
> The goal is to enable the sharing of movements between competitors. For example
> someone might decide to post the stand up movement on the wiki. New competitors
> will then be able to use it without having to spend days (weeks?) coding. This
> will hopefully speed up the evolution of all competitors and increase the
> accessibility of the competition.
> 
> 
> 3. Mouvement creation Interface
> 
> The motion interface created by Xavier (Kubiak) and posted on the wiki for last
> years competition has many excellent features and seems to me a great approach
> for easy creation of motions. My goal is to use this interface to create the xml
> file defining motions (see point 2). This way, motions could be loaded/created
> directly from the movement creation tool and later used by the controllers
> without needing to code anything.
> 
> 
> For this project I would specially need the collaboration of Xavier. I heard
> from Olivier you have a new version of your Motion creation Tool. I am wondering
> to witch degree you would like to combine your efforts with mine (any interest
> in this project?), and if I may use your code to contribute to the competition.
> 
> I am also relying on all of you to get some feedback/ideas from experienced
> competitors about my project and ideas. I am open to any critiks and remarks (Is
> any body interested in these standards/tools?). Keep in mind these tools should
> help you and new competitors not just decorate the web sit :-).
> 
> 
> To all of you who made it to the end of this mail: congratulations and thanks
> for the interest
> 
> Jean-Philippe
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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