Summary

In its great tradition of following in the footsteps of other, more successful companies, MondoSoft has decided to ride the coat tails of the popularity of the Roomba (TM)¹. Thus, Management has decided that MondoSoft will enter the home robotics world. Of course, physical robots are nasty, dirty, difficult, fragile, and, most of all, expensive things². Therefore, MondoSoft will start its foray into the robotics domain with JRoboExplorer, a purely simulation-based offering. (The hope is that if the simulations are successful, MondoSoft can get some VC to fund the venture and con some other poor schmuck, I mean, company into actually building the hardware.)

You, the talented and dedicated lead³ software engineer for MondoSoft, will be in charge of developing the initial JRoboExplorer simulation system. You are charged with delivering a multi-purpose robotic simulator that demonstrates your robot's ability to learn its way around environments, improve its performance over time, and adapt to indoor and outdoor environments. Furthermore, in order to convince the Venture Capitalists that JRoboExplorerreally does what Management claims that it does, you are also required to produce a series of tests and a technical report that demonstrate all of these capabilities of your 'bot software. Finally, in case the whole plan tanks, Management wants to ensure that they can recover some value, so they've asked you to build the system around a reusable world simulation component.⁴