Biter

This talk summarizes material from:

Paul Buhler and José M. Vidal. Biter: A Platform for the Teaching and Research of Multiagent Systems' Design using RoboCup. [1] A. Birk and S. Coradeschi and S. Tadokoro ed.In RoboCup 2001: Robot Soccer World Cup V. LNCS/LNAI Lecture Notes Volume 2377, Springer-Verlag. 2002.
Hrishikesh J. Goradia and José M. Vidal. Building Blocks for Agent Design. [2] Paolo Giorgini ed.In Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Springer-Verlag. 2004.
Biter Homepage [3]
SoccerBeans Homepage [4]

Spring 2000: First use of Robocup in Introduction to Multiagent Systems class. Students built almost everything from scratch. Most of the time was spent on building and maintaining a world model with absolute coordinates. Paul Buhler implements the first version of Biter for his project. This version already includes the world model.
Shaun Wood works on it during the summer, adding low-level functions for finding players in view cone, intercepting ball, etc., as well as a graphical debugging tool.
Fall 2000: First use of Biter in the class is successful. While the system is in use José Vidal releases version 2.0 which implements the Generic Agent Architecture.
During the winter break José gets rid of the multiple threads and is able to dribble the ball around the player (tight integration with with sserver's action loop).
During the summers of 2001 and 2003 Hrishikesh Goradia added some more behaviors. This became the other version available for download.
Our design was heavily influenced by The CMUnited-98 Champion Simulator Team. [5]
Fall 2001: Hrishikesh Goradia has developed SoccerBeans [6] which lets you implemented new players by dragging and dropping beans.

For students to spend their time dealing with issues of agent coordination, cooperation, and emergent behaviors, but without completely sacrificing performance.
Biter does not provide tournament-level performance, but it would not be hard to extend it to do so.
To enable students to explore both reactive and goal-driven (BDI) architectures, and everything in between.
To provide students with a basic framework and avoid the dreaded if-then-else statement with 40 else-if parts and a nesting level of up to 10.
To provide help in debugging. This is minimal at the moment. A logging facility would be nice.
In the future I hope to get one of you to implement Java Bean behaviors so that students can drag-and-drop their way to creating a new agent.

Biter receives see commands from the sserver and parses them.
Biter maintains a WorldModel which has the absolute location of every object on the field that the agent can or has seen recently.
Static objects are read in at startup.
First, the closest line and flag are used to determine the player's absolute location, then the location of all other objects is deduced from it. Their certainty is set to one.
If the ball is not seen then its updated using dead-reckoning from its previous velocity. The certainty about its location is reduced. When the certainty reaches zero it is removed.
Player positions can be updated the same way.
You will need to decide how fast to forget (reduce phantom objects).

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