Swarm Class

This Swarm class is now renamed as App, according to the standard naming convention for Java programs. The file can be found on /src/main/java/App.java.

Table of content

Introduction
- Create an Experiment
  - With a single robot
  - With a group of robot

Introduction

This class is similar to most of the standard Java classes that will be used as an entry point to a program. The structure is as below:

import swarm.configs.MQTTSettings;
import swarm.robot.VirtualRobot;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Properties;

import Robots.samples.SampleRobot;

public class App {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        try {
            // COMPLETE THIS BEFORE RUN
            // Read config properties from the file, src/resources/config/mqtt.properties
            // If it isn't there, please make one, as given sample in the
            // 'sample_mqtt.properties' file

            File configFile = new File("src/resources/config/mqtt.properties");
            FileReader reader = new FileReader(configFile);
            Properties props = new Properties();
            props.load(reader);

            MQTTSettings.server = props.getProperty("server");
            MQTTSettings.port = Integer.parseInt(props.getProperty("port", "1883"));
            MQTTSettings.userName = props.getProperty("username");
            MQTTSettings.password = props.getProperty("password");
            MQTTSettings.channel = props.getProperty("channel", "v1");
            reader.close();

            VirtualRobot robot = new SampleRobot(10, -52, 32, 45);
            new Thread(robot).start();

        } catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
            // file does not exist
            System.out.println("File Not Found !!!");

        } catch (IOException ex) {
            // I/O error
            System.out.println("IO Error !!!");
        }
    }

}

Create an Experiment

With a single robot

First, it will try to load the configuration file, and apply the configuration values into the MQTTSettings class. These config values will define the MQTT broker need to be used for communicate with the simulator application.
You can use a code snippet like following to initiate a single Virtual Robot instance. Insted of SampleRobot, you can use your own implementation.

int id = 0; // an uniquire identifier for each robot
int x = 10; // starting x coordinate
int y = 20; // starting y coordinate
int heading = 45; // heading direction in degrees 

VirtualRobot robot = new SampleRobot(id, x, y, heading);
new Thread(robot).start();

With a group of robot

You can write a code snippet like below for start a group of robots. However, initiating multiple robots can cause to the simulation performance, since robots are working on different threads.

int[] robotList = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 };

int startX = 0;
int startY = 0;
int startHeading = 90;

Robot[] vr = new VirtualRobot[robotList.length];

for (int i = 0; i < robotList.length; i++) {
    vr[i] = new SampleRobot(robotList[i], startX + 40 * i, startY + 50 * i,
            startHeading + 10 * i);
    new Thread(vr[i]).start();
}