Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Replace the 2D environment of previous simulator with a 3D environment;
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New, more realistic, physics model;
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Simulation results should not be dependent on available computational power or
on the quality of network resources.
Similarly to the 2D simulator, the simulation environment of the RoboCup Simulation
3D League is based on a client-server model. The simulator is the server and agents
and visualization tools are the clients. The simulator creates the virtual environment
(soccer field, markers, goals, etc.) where agents live, sends sensory information to the
agents, receives their actions and applies the virtual physics model in order to resolve
positions, collisions and interactions with the ball.
The development of the 3D simulator used available open-source tools extensively.
It used the SPADES [45] framework for the management of agent-world communica-
tion and synchronization, ODE [46] for the physical model, expat for XML
processing, Ruby for scripting language support and boost for several utilities.
Until 2006 the 3D simulation server [47] used the spheres as player model (Fig. 2)
and teams had 11 players. A virtual vision sensor sends information about the relative
positions of the objects in the world. Replying each sensation an agent sent actions
like drive or kick. Driving implied applying a force on the body with a given direction
and kicking implied applying a force on the ball radially to the agent. Each sensation
was received on every 20 cycles of the server and each cycle took 10 ms.
Fig. 2.
3D Simulation league match - sphere model (left); Humanoid robot model (right)
In 2007 the robot model used in the 3D simulator changed from the sphere
to a humanoid model. Also the SPADES support was abandoned and a simpler
type of timer was developed. The humanoid model used in 2007 was based on
the HOAP humanoid robot, then in 2008 the model based on the Nao humanoid
robot from Aldebaran has been adopted. The Nao based model has been kept, with
very few changes since 2008 until 2012. Due to problems in the simulator, games
were played in 2007 between teams of only two players. The number of agents
in each team has been increasing over the years and reached 11 players, like in real
soccer, in 2009.
