Department of Computer Science

The XGrabtor Graphic Interface for XRaptor

Introduction

XGrabtor is a graphic interface for the XRaptor multiagent simulation environment developed by Günter Bruns, Peter Mössinger, Daniel Polani, Thomas Uthmann and others at the University of Mainz. Until now, agents for XRaptor have to be written in C++, requiring C++ knowledge and a certain level of understanding of the XRaptor simulation loop. To make the learning curve smoother, we are now introducing XGrabtor as a frontend for the development of agent strategies.

In XGrabtor, agents are developed using an intuitive graphical interface, displaying sensors, actuators and operations as nodes. From this graphical XGrabtor representation, you can export and compile C++ code that works seamlessly with XRaptor. After that, you only have to call the executable 'xraptor' to run a given simulation, without having to know anything about C++. The generated C++-code, however, is relatively readable and can be used to learn more about XRaptor programming.

Requirements

To run the XRaptor/XGrabtor combination, you need a Linux/Unix environment. For XRaptor, you need to install Motif or a replacement (e.g. Lesstif) if you haven't it already installed. An XRaptor installation can use OpenGL or replacements (e.g. Mesa) if available, but they are not necessary for the scenario covered by the graphical XGrabtor tool. You need XRaptor 7.3.8b or later.

Finally, for the installation of XGrabtor, you need PLT Scheme, since XGrabtor itself is written in Scheme.

Downloads

XGrabtor

XRaptor (Ant Scenario)

The following are XRaptor versions specially adapted to xgrabtor for the ant colony scenario:

Installation Notes

Installation uses configure and make in the usual fashion (for details see 'INSTALL' file in the distribution). At present, two things should be taken into account:
  1. The --prefix flag used in the configuration of XGrabtor must be the same one as for the XRaptor installation (this will be improved in the future).
  2. Before running XGrabtor, the user should copy the demo/makefile from the XRaptor distribution into a file share/XRaptor/demo under the XRaptor prefix directory. E.g, if the prefix is /usr/local then create a directory /usr/local/share/XRaptor/demo and copy the demo/makefile from the XRaptor distribution into that directory.

Comments

The last version of XGrabtor is 0.33a. Since we might have introduced some new bugs (although we are not aware of any), we still keep the link for the older versions.

FAQ

At present, there is no full-fledged manual available, but XGrabtor is quite intuitive to use. Use the FAQ instead.

Home (Daniel Polani)

Last changed at Wed Jun 17 00:42:47 2009 by D. Polani