Virtual Humanoid Soccer Competition

Virtual Humanoid Soccer Competition 

Contents

This website will give an overview of the technical details for the Virtual Humanoid Soccer competition. 

Latest Documents

  • Webots Repository with the latest simulator updates for the league: here
  • Robot Model Specifications: here
  • Robot Controller API Documentation: here
  • Server Infrastructure Specifications: here

Simulator

The open-source simulator Webots is used for the Virtual Humanoid Soccer competition. The Technical Committee will provide:

  • the game environment, including a model of the artificial grass and stadium surroundings
  • an automatic refereeing system enforcing the laws of the game which communicates with the GameController software 

The latest version of the competition setup, including the final virtual environment, can be found in the official RoboCup-Humanoid-TC repository.

Teams need to provide a robot model to compete with, as well as the robot control software. 

Laws of the Game

The laws of the game have been adapted from the Humanoid Soccer Competition Laws of the Game 2020. The current draft of the rules can be found here: https://humanoid.robocup.org/materials/rules/ 

The changes marked are in comparison to the 2020 version of the Humanoid Soccer Competition Laws of the Game.

The latest version of the rules has been published on April 30th, no major changes are expected for the competition.

Game Environment

The official game environment including a Darwin OP robot model can be found in the Webots repository. The visuals of the game environment can be considered final and will only be updated if absolutely necessary.

AutoRef

The Humanoid League will provide an automatic refereeing system to enforce the laws of the game. The decisions made by the AutoRef software are final, even if they may, at times, be faulty. After the simulation was conducted and the resulting video streamed, teams have half an hour to virtually sign the game result or complain about the result to the Technical Committee. Complaints need to be based on serious violations of fair behavior repeatedly performed by the opponent team during the game. In case of a complaint, the Technical Committee will review the game and either decide that the game result is valid, or that the game needs to be replayed. In the latter case, the team showing unsportive behavior may receive a yellow card and need to change their software to prevent the unsportive behavior seen in the game.

The final version of the AutoRef software has been published on May 19th. From now on, only bug fixes are expected in the simulator.

Robot Model & Control Software

A sample robot model is provided in the Webots repository. Teams are expected to provide their own robot models to compete with. However, they may choose to play with the robot of another team or the sample robot model.

Robot Model

To ensure that the robot models created by the individual teams do not violate the requirements set by the Technical Committee, all robot models need to be submitted ahead of time and respect the robot model specifications. The submission process consists of two steps:

  1. An initial model needs to be submitted via the only submission system by April 23rd. All teams submitting a robot model will then be assigned to two other teams to peer-review the robot model provided by the other team. Teams have until May 3rd to provide the result of the peer-review process via the submission system.
  2. Teams receive feedback on the robot model both from the two teams peer-reviewing their model as well as from the Technical Committee on May 7th. They are then given time to implement the feedback and change the model until May 23rd. The second version of the robot model will be checked by the Technical Committee to ensure all requirements are met and feedback will be sent to teams by May 31st.
  3. If some robots have not passed the inspection after May 31st, teams will be allowed until June 11th to submit a final update.

All teams that have passed the robot inspection will need to submit a written request to the Technical Committee, including the new version of the robot model as well as a statement including: (a) what changes were made to the robot model and (b) why these changes were made.

Changes requested less than 12 hours prior to the next scheduled game are not guaranteed to be reviewed by the Technical Committee in time.

Robot Control Software

Teams will be able to perceive their environment and act based on the dedicated API which is still under discussion and will be updated on April 19th. The next update is expected to finalize the numbers on the bandwidth and update frequency.

Teams need to submit the latest version of the robot control software latest two hours prior to their next scheduled games. The control software needs to be provided as Docker images via a container registry provided by the Organizers. Teams are allowed to submit multiple Docker images per game. However, each individual image may not exceed 10 GB.

Competition

The competition will be set up to resemble the Humanoid Soccer Competition as closely as possible. This includes a virtual space provided to teams to collaboratively work together and meet other teams as well as streaming of the virtual games. To keep the tournament interesting and exciting, teams do only receive access to the log files after the games have been streamed. 

Setup

Each robot runs on its own virtual instance. Instances will have an Intel Cascade Lake with 4 vCPU and a Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU.

Details on the setup and the procedure to simulate games on a server are presented in the server specification.

Robot instances may only communicate with each other over the network. Network communication is limited to 1 Mbit/s per team and this rule will be strictly enforced. Robots will receive all necessary information about the game state via the GameController. 

Mock-Competition

To allow teams to test their simulation software under realistic conditions, the Technical Committee will host a mock-competition from June 4th to June 6th 2021. Teams signed up for the mock-competition will receive the possibility to upload their software and play simulated games either against other teams or their own robots. Details about the mock-competition, a schedule, and the game results can be found here.