Multithreading with Java? Anyone using it?

[adamdb]

Specifically, I would like to put the camera and target detection on a separate thread, but would be interested in examples of doing anything in a separate thread.

[SavtaKenneth]

We are doing a multithreaded application. I'm at home right now so I don't have any hand on code examples but for how to program using threads in java look into Thread class and the Runnable interface. Basically a threaded camera/targer would look something like this

public class Targeter implements Runnable{
Arguments
Arguments
Arguments
Arguments

public void run(){
while(true){
     aimTheTarger();
}

public void start(){
Thread p = new Thread(this,"This is a Thread");
p.start();
}

public class Vision implements Runnable{
Arguments
Arguments
Arguments
Arguments

public void run(){
while(true){
     TakeAPicture();
}

public void start(){
Thread p = new Thread(this,"This is a Thread");
p.start();
}

Also look into the synchronized keyword which is useful for making sure threads don't interrupt each other.
Good luck

~Kenneth
Team #2212 The Spikes

[spartango]

If you have a look at the GRTFramework(code.google.com/p/grtframework), you'll notice that we use multithreading extensively, with sensor and actuator abstractions/drivers being independent threads, and controllers for specific robot mechanisms acting completely independently from each other. We have not noticed any real performance costs thus far, and thus strongly recommend a threaded model to segregated robot parts.

I'm not saying that threading has no performance costs, but for the purposes of this competition they are not noticeable even with java threads.