[1] Running Experiments - BCLab-UNM/iAnt-ARGoS GitHub Wiki

In order to run an experiment in ARGoS, the following conditions must be met:

  1. Install ARGoS on your Mac or Linux machine. ARGoS is installed on UNM CS Department Linux systems.
  2. Download the iAnt-ARGoS code or clone the repository.
  3. Compile the iAnt-ARGoS code to generate the shared object files plugged in to ARGoS.
  4. Edit or Create an ARGoS XML configuration file for an experiment.
  5. Run ARGoS.

Running ARGoS in Terminal

ARGoS is run via the Terminal using the following command:

$ argos3 -c local/path/to/XML/file.argos
Command Description
argos3 The ARGoS simulator command. Currently on version 3. Assuming a correct installation of ARGoS, you should be able to run this command from anywhere on your system. Ideally, you would be running the simulator from within the iAnt-ARGoS folder downloaded from this repo.
-c FILE REQUIRED to run a simulation, this command supplies ARGoS with an XML configuration file.

Additional Command Line Help

You can view additional ARGoS help information at any time by running the following command:

$ argos3 -h

Important Notes About File Output

ARGoS provides methods for data output to files. However, the primary way to collect data with this plugin is to set a data output flag in the XML configuration file. You can edit file output by making changes to the iAnt_loop_functions class and recompiling the plugin.

To enable data file output, you must change the following flag in the ARGoS XML file:

<!-- LOOP FUNCTIONS -->
<loop_functions ...>
    <simulation_settings     ...
                             outputData="1"
                             ...
                             .../>
    ...
    ...
</loop_functions>
Loop Functions Flag Value Effect
outputData 0 No data file output is generated for the experiment.
1 After an experiment, ARGoS will create a file named iAntTagData.txt containing simulation run data. If this file was already created from a previous experiment it will always be appended to. This file is always generated locally where ARGoS is run.

The data recorded by this plugin includes:

  1. number of tags collected within the simulation's run time

  2. time in minutes of the simulation

  3. the random number seed; used to repeat past experiments

     tags_collected, time_in_minutes, random_seed
 39, 1, 1337
 25, 0, 1337
 5, 1, 1337
 111, 19, 1337
 241, 66, 1337
 4, 0, 1338
 53, 53, 1337
 41, 60, 1337
 36, 35, 1338
 84, 22, 1337
 177, 60, 1337
 180, 60, 1338
 177, 60, 1337