User guide

How does it work?

SimionZoo provides two main applications for the end-user: Badger and the Herd Agent service/daemon. Experiments are designed in Badger, which sends them to be run by the slave machines running the Herd Agent service. This means you have decide which machines will be used as slaves to actually run the experiments and which one will be used as master to design, send, monitor and analyze the results. The same machine can act as master and slave at the same time.

Installation

Follow these steps to install SimionZoo:

• Download the binaries here. It includes both Windows and Linux binaries.

• Install the Herd Agent service in the machines you want to use to run the experiments (might be the same computer you use to design/monitor them) using either:

  • Windows x86/x64 service (bin/HerdAgentInstaller.msi)
  • Linux x64 daemon installer. The service/daemon will start running as soon as you install them, and any time you boot the machine:

sudo chmod 770 bin/HerdAgentInstaller-linux.sh
sudo bin/HerdAgentInstaller-linux.sh

Start running experiments

Now you can design, run and analyze experiments from the main app: Badger. There are two versions:

• GUI: (bin/Badger.exe) currently only for Windows x86/x64. There are several tutorials in this wiki to learn how to use Badger:
  • Tutorial #0: Quick walk-trough
  • Tutorial #1: Using a PID controller on the rain-car test environment.
  • Tutorial #2: Using a Q-Learning agent on the rain-car test environment.
  • Tutorial #3: Using an Actor/Critic agent on the rain-car test environment.
    The project files for the experiments in these tutorials can be found in experiments/examples/tutorials.
• Command-line Badger (bin/Badger-Console.exe) for Windows and Linux.

FAQ

Herd Agent

How do I start/stop the service if it's not running?

• Windows: Start->cmd (as Administrator) -> net start|stop herdagent
• Linux: sudo /etc/init.d/herd-agent-daemon start|stop

What ports do I have to open for the agent to be reached?

• Windows: The installer should add the needed rules to bypass the Windows firewall. To install the agent, just right-click in Visual Studio on Installers/Herd Agent installer project->install.
• Linux: No need to open any port. By default required ports are open.