The RoboCup Simulation League is one of five soccer leagues within the RoboCup initiative. [1]
It is characterised by independently moving software players (agents) that play soccer on a virtual field inside a computer simulation.
It is divided into four subleagues: [2]
The 2D simulation sub-league had its first release in early 1995 [3] with version 0.1. It has been actively maintained since then with updates every few months. [4] The ball and all players are represented as circles on the plane of the field. Their position is restricted to the two dimensions of the plane.
SimSpark, the platform on top of which the 3D simulation sub-league is built, was registered with SourceForge in 2004. [5] The platform itself is now well established [6] with ongoing development. [7] The ball and all players are represented as articulated rigid bodies within a system that enforces the simulation of physical properties such as mass, inertia and friction.
As of 2010, a direct comparison of the gameplay of the 2D and 3D leagues shows a marked difference. [8] 2D league teams are generally exhibiting advanced strategies and teamwork, whereas 3D teams appear to struggle with the basics of stability and ambulation. This is partly due to the difference in age of the two leagues, and partly to the difference in complexity involved in building agents for the two leagues. Replaying log files of finals over the recent years shows progress is being made by many teams.
In the 2D system, movement around the plane is achieved via commands from the agents such as move, dash, turn and kick. [9] The 3D system has fewer command choices for agents to send, but the mechanics of motion about the field are much more involved as the positions of 22 hinges throughout the articulated body must be simultaneously controlled.
FlightGear Flight Simulator is a free, open source multi-platform flight simulator developed by the FlightGear project since 1997.
RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1996 by a group of university professors. The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offering a publicly appealing – but formidable – challenge.
TORCS is an open-source 3D car racing simulator available on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, AmigaOS 4, AROS, MorphOS and Microsoft Windows. TORCS was created by Eric Espié and Christophe Guionneau, but project development is now headed by Bernhard Wymann. It is written in C++ and is licensed under the GNU GPL. TORCS is designed to enable pre-programmed AI drivers to race against one another, while allowing the user to control a vehicle using either a keyboard, mouse, or wheel input.
RoboCup Junior (RCJ), sometimes stylised RobocupJunior, is a division of RoboCup, a not-for-profit robotics organisation. It focuses on education and aims to introduce the larger goals of the RoboCup project to primary and secondary school aged children. Participants compete in one of three main leagues: Soccer, Rescue or Dance. Dance Theatre also exists as a sub-league of Dance, and Premier Rescue is part of the competition in Australia and New Zealand.
As one of the founding leagues of the international RoboCup initiative, the RoboCup Middle Size League (MSL) robot soccer competition has been organised from 1997 onwards. On an indoor soccer field, with goals of reduced size, teams of five fully autonomous soccer playing robots compete against one another. No human intervention is allowed during a match, except to take robots on or from the field. Although limitations with respect to maximum size and weight are in place, teams are completely free to design both hardware and software.
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is a discontinued Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation that was aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handled a wide variety of robot hardware. It requires a Microsoft Windows 7 operating system or later.
A soccer robot is a specialized autonomous robot and mobile robot that is used to play variants of soccer.
The RoboCup Small Size League (SSL) is one of the RoboCup soccer leagues.
SimSpark is a generic simulation system for various multiagent simulations. It supports developing physical simulations for AI and robotics research with an open-source application framework. It is commonly used in academic research and education.
Robocup Rescue Simulation is an education and research project intended to promote the development of robotic agents for search and rescue. The project was initiated in reaction to the Great Hanshin earthquake, which hit Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, on 17 January 1995, killing more than six thousand people, most of them in the city of Kobe.
PlaneShift is a free to play, cross-platform 3D Online Multiplayer Role Playing Game in a fantasy setting. The game requires client software to be installed on the player's computer. The project is no-budget and produced by a group of developers guided by the Atomic Blue organization. The development team comprises volunteers from mostly European countries and North America.
The RoboCup 2D Simulated Soccer League is the oldest of the RoboCup Soccer Simulation Leagues. It consists of a number of competitions with computer simulated soccer matches as the main event.
The RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League allows software agents to control humanoid robots to compete against one another in a realistic simulation of the rules and physics of a game of soccer. The platform strives to reproduce the software programming challenges faced when building real physical robots for this purpose. In doing so, it helps research towards the RoboCup Federation's goal of developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team in 2050.
The 1997 RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation League was the first RoboCup competition promoted in conjunction with International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in Nagoya, Japan, from 23 to 29 August 1997.
The 1998 Robocup 2D Soccer Simulation League was a simulated soccer competition contested in the 1st Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Paris, France.
The 2012 RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation League was a simulated soccer competition contested in the 16th Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in June 2012.
Art of Illusion is a free software, and open source software package for making 3D graphics.
NimbRo is the robot competition team of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group of University of Bonn, Germany. It was founded in 2004 at the University of Freiburg, Germany.