RoboCup Simulator Execution

The easiest way to get started using the software is to make use of the simulator, which will be most useful for developing much of the actual system. For these instructions, you will need to be in a terminal in your robocup folder (/robocup/software/trunk). The first scenario will start a simulator with a single robot, and the second scenario will start two teams with referee control.

Before starting the simulator

To avoid flooding the network with data from your simulator, we have a script to reroute some networking processes. You will need to follow these instructions once before running the simulator, but the setting will remain correct until you reboot.

sudo ./doc/mcast_route lo

Single-team Simulator Use

In this case, we will only drive one team, the other team's robots will just remain stationary

Starting the Simulator

We will start the simulator to run in a terminal. You can run the soccsim executable without parameters to get a small explanation of the correct arguments, if necessary.

cd ./SoccSim/bin
./soccsim -c ../config/two_teams.xml &

Now the simulator should report that it is running. To stop the simulator, kill the process by typing Ctrl-C in the terminal where you started it.

Running Under Simulation

• Reroute the multicast packets - this is to keep your simulator from flooding any network you are on with vision packets.
  • Starting from the software/trunk folder
  • cd doc/
  • ./mcast_route lo [requires root password]
• Start the simulator itself with a configuration to describe how many robots it starts with. There are multiple configurations available in the SoccSim/config folder, but two_teams will provide the default for most soccer applications.
  • cd SoccSim/bin
  • ./soccsim -c ../config/two_teams.xml
• At this point, there is a small wireframe display of the field with robots, but it isn't particularly interactive. To actually do robot control and soccer playing, you will need to create instances of soccer for each team.
  • Starting from the previous step
  • cd ../../soccer/bin
  • ./soccer -b -c ../config/sim.xml
    • This command starts soccer with the blue team (-b) flag, the robot configuration for the simulator. To specify the other team, use -y instead of -b. The sim config should be used whenever the simulator is used.