Distributed Optimization Tool for RoboCup 3D Soccer Simulation League Using Intel DevCloud

Abstract

Due to the physical limitations of real robots, simulated robotics is an important area of research that opens up a lot of possibilities to study the robots’ dynamics and program their behaviors. RoboCup 3D Soccer Simulation league is a tournament to encourage the development of robots that compete in a high-fidelity simulation ambient. Due to the high complexity of simulated humanoid robots, numerical optimization techniques are often used to determine the best parameters to control their motion sequence. Even the simplest movements, such as walking, stopping and getting up, can have a meaningful impact on a simulated soccer match if well optimized. Such a process is time consuming and has a high computational cost. For this reason, the usage of high performance clusters is a good way to accelerate the optimization, and for this technology to be used, it is necessary to develop a reliable tool that interfaces the cluster, simulation, and optimization. The main contribution of this work is to provide a distributed optimization tool for the RoboCup 3D Soccer Simulation League based on the Intel DevCloud cluster.