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Sebastian Sardina edited this page Jan 17, 2020 · 6 revisions

APPARATE Path Planner Simulator and Visualization System

Overview

APPARATE is an application package to code, simulate, and visualize various path planning algorithms, such as A*, Real-time A* or incremental path planners like D* or Moving Target. To do so, the framework provides an interface to implement pathfinding algorithms and to run them, get statistics, and visualize them. The simulator uses Moving-AI+ maps.

APPARATE is a suitable tool for testing incremental algorithms; it allows dynamic changes to the environment (like adding water areas or moving the target location), via a script or the GUI interface. Also, APPARATE is able to change the path-planning algorithms on-the-fly and can handle large maps.

APPARATE can be used for teaching purposes for students to code advanced search and execution algorithms and develop their own ones. See AOPD-2012 for an example.

You can check a video of APPARATE in action by clicking on this image

Click to watch a video!

APPARATE contains three packages:

  1. jpathplan: set of generic classes to define path planners.
  2. gui: all the classes to implement the simulation and visualization.
  3. agents: agents that can do actions in the map, by outputting one action per simulation cycle. Agents can use path-planners.

Two related projects (and repos) are:

  1. Map Creator: To be able to create text map files easier (e.g., from an image file done in GIMP).
  2. Extra Agents and Path Planners: Additional, more complex, agents, many of them using powerful path-planners.
    • NOTE: This repo is private and requires permission.

For bugs, issues, and extensions please open an issue.

Have fun developing your agents!!!

Sections

  1. Compiling and Running APPARATE: for instructions on how to build and run agents in the framework.
  2. Configuration File: Format of the configuration file to run the simulator.
  3. Information on Maps: includes map extensions and dynamic scripts.
  4. Some Search Algorithms: for some pointers to interesting search and path planning algorithms and techniques.
  5. The HRTimer class for high-resolution timing via native interface JNI. Useful for algorithms like Deadline Aware Search (DAS) that require timing.
  6. Changelog: on major releases.

Contributors

  • Sebastian Sardina (project supervisor, developer, and contact - ssardina@gmail.com).
  • Abhijeet Anand (developed JPathPlan library as part of his 2011 Minor Thesis, which provides the generic framework to develop path planners).
  • Andy Heng Xie (developed first GUI version as part of a summer project).
  • Nitin Yadav
  • Geoff Sutcliffe and Rhys van der Waerden (for the HRTimer utility)

We thank Prof. Jorge Baier from Universidad Catolica of Chile for providing his original path-planning simulator in which we built on our system.

License

This project is using the GPLv3 for open source licensing for information and the license visit GNU website (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html).

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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