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.
Batch Processing
September 6, 2009, 23.19To allow Ikaros to be run in batch mode we are investigating different ways to automatically run several instances with different parameters. A new batch element has been introduced in the IKC-files that sets the default value for a parameter depending on the index of the process. The batch element defines a target parameter and a values-array with the different values. The inheritance mechanism in the IKC-files is used to assign the value to a module when that parameter is not specified in the module.
The batch element works like so:
<batch target="sigma" values="0.1 0.2 0.3" />
This would assign the parameter sigma the value 0.1 for the process with index 1, 0.2 to the process with index 2 and so on. To run Ikaros in batch mode the command line argument -B should be set. This functionality will be included in version 1.2. In the future, batch mode will use MPI to run on larger computers.
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].