76 What is NuTank? (Robotics)
Description
This article is from the Robotics FAQ, by Kevin Dowling nivek@cs.cmu.edu with numerous contributions by others.
76 What is NuTank? (Robotics)
NuTank stands for NeuralTank. It is a program to simulate complex
networks and interactions. In this program one is given the shell of a
2 dimensional robotic tank. The tank has various I/O devices like
wheels, whiskers, optical sensors, smell, fuel level, sound and such.
These I/O sensors are connected to Neurons. The player/designer uses
more Neurons to interconnect the I/O devices. One can have any level
of complexity desired (640k memory limited) and do subsumptive
designs. More complex design take slightly more fuel, so life is not
free. All movement costs fuel too. One can also tag neuron connections
as "adaptable" that adapt their weights in accordance with the target
neuron. This allows neurons to learn.
The Neuron editor can handle 3 dimensional arrays of neurons as single
entities with very flexible interconnect patterns. One can also design
a Glyph or drawing to represent the robot and/or obstacle. (or bug,
worm, whatever) One can then design a scenario with walls, rocks, fat
(fuel) sources (that can be smelled) and many other such things.
Robot tanks are then introduced into the Scenario and allowed to
interact or battle it out. The last one alive wins, or maybe one just
watches the motion of the robots for fun. While the scenario is
running it can be stopped, edited, zoom'd, and can track on any robot.
One can designate a neuron group as the probe group and get a display
of the neural activity of that group. This helps debug designs.
The entire program is mouse and graphically based. It uses DOS and VGA
and is written in TurboC++
There will also be the ability to download designs to another computer
and source code will be available for the core neural simulator. This
will allow one to design neural systems and download them to real
robots. This feature may be in the Beta release, around August 94. The
design tools can handle three dimensional networks so will work with
video camera inputs and such.
Eventually I expect to do a port to UNIX and multi thread the program.
I also expect to do a Mac port and maybe NT or OS/2
The theory that I eventually want to test has to do with the self
oscillating nature of combined subsumptive and standard neural nets.
One can also work on flock and pack behavior.
I have a paper I've written called Artificial Cognition that discusses
a theory of the combination of regular neural nets and subsumptive
networks. In the shareware file it is called Paper.ps and will need to
be printed on a PostScript printer. You may get copies of it by
sending $5 to Keene Educational Software.
"Getting NuTank:" NuTank now has a shareware version. It is about 300k
bytes compressed. The file is nutank.exe and is a PKZip executable for
dos machines. It must be put in a directory called C:\nutank
To unpack nutank first put nutank.exe in C:
C:
mkdir nutank
cd nutank
..\nutank.exe -d
After it unpacks "nutank.exe" is the program If anyone would like to
put it on their server feel free to do so. If you put the shareware on
your sever please tell me so I can send you updates.
Nutank shareware is available at these ftp sites:
[3]ftp://cher.media.mit.edu:/pub/incomming/ or
[4]ftp://ftp.essex.ac.uk:/robot/Simulators/NuTank The shareware
version has the ability to write to disk disabled. Feel free to pass
the shareware version around. The regular version costs $50 (includes
a printed copy of the paper) and can be had by sending $50 US to
Richard Keene
Keene educational Software
8155 Lone Oak Court
Littleton, CO 80124
I am at the Park City Group and can be reached at 801-649-2221
NuTank, Copyright Richard Keene 1994, All rights reserved.
Continue to:
My Books
