Version 1.2 of the IKC file specification published
June 15, 2010, 12.38The specification of the newest version of the Ikaros Control File format is now available. The new version includes support for automatic sizing of outputs, complex delay specifications and full inheritance of attributes. In version 1.2 of Ikaros, it will be mandatory to describe each module in a corresponding IKC-file.
Version 1.2 Nearly Feature Complete
February 20, 2010, 1.18A nearly feature complete version 1.2 of Ikaros is available as a CVS snapshot as version 1.1.456. There are still a few bugs to work out for the final release and the build system has only been tested with OS X so far but everything should be compatible with Windows and Linux.
The visible new feature is a rebuilt WebUI with some support for interactivity. There are also functions to inspect the hierarchy in an IKC-file from the WebUI as well as a graphical display of modules and connections. In addition, it now possible to build new modules using only two functions since most features of a module can be specified in the IKC-files.
Journal Article about Ikaros
September 7, 2009, 00.01An article that describes Ikaros has been published in Advanced Engineering Informatics. A preprint version is available as PDF. The article describes the motivation for the system and how the different components work.
What is Ikaros?
The Ikaros project started in 2001 and its goal is to develop an open infrastructure for system level modeling of the brain including databases of experimental data, computational models and functional brain data. The system makes heavy use of the emerging standards for Internet based information and will make all information accessible through an open web-based interface. In addition, Ikaros can be used as a control architecture for robots which in the extension will lead to the development of a brain inspired robot architecture.
The main components of the Ikaros systems are:
- A platform independent simulation kernel
- A set of computational brain models
- A set of I/O modules for interfacing with data files and peripheral such as robots or video cameras
- Tools for building systems of interconnected models
- A plug-in architecture that allows new models to be easily added to the system
- A database with data from learning experiments that can be used for validation of the computational models.
A comprehensive overview of Ikaros is given in the article Ikaros: Building Cognitive Models for Robots [PDF].