Simulated Humanoid Wrestling Competition in webots.cloud
5 October 2023
Webots and webots.cloud are essential components of the OpenDR toolkit used for simulating robots. Webots is widely used inside, but also outside the OpenDR project. webots.cloud is pretty new and was actively developed during the OpenDR project. It allows users to easily share their Webots simulations online, including models, animations, interactive simulations and even simulated robotics competitions. To promote the capabilities of webots.cloud and encourage more users to take advantage of it, we organized a series of simulated robot programming competitions based on humanoid wrestling (see Fig. 1). The first competition was held at ICRA 2023 (London) and the second ran remotely during IROS 2023 (Detroit). Both editions gathered more than 32 teams worldwide and only the best 32 teams were selected for participation to the finals. The ICRA 2023 results and the IROS 2023 results are available online, including the playback of the games in 3D on the web, utilizing on the webots.cloud technology developed in the OpenDR project.
Fig. 1. Simulation world in which two humanoid robots wrestle against each other.
The competition focuses on the development of advanced humanoid robot control software for a wrestling game in which all shots are allowed. It relies on a calibrated simulation model of the NAO robot, running in the Webots simulator with realistic physics, sensor and actuator simulation. The winning team receives one Ether crypto-currency (priced around USD 1’640 on October 5th, 2023) and an official certificate.
Being spectacular and easy to get started with, this competition aimed at gathering a large number of competitors. The fully open-source competition software stack was designed to be re-used as a template for other robot competitions.
The competition engine is fully implemented in GitHub: a new participant can enter the competition by simply creating a GitHub repository for their code from a template repository provided by the organizer of the competition. Then, the participant can edit a JSON file to set their name, team members, programming language, etc. As soon as the participant commits any change to their repository, an evaluation is automatically run in the GitHub CI: their robot will play a game against the robot just above them in the leader board (see Fig. 2). If they win, they will swap their position with their opponent and play another game against the new robot above them, and so on until they loose a game or reach the top of the ranking. All games are recorded so that anyone can view the results online by playing back 3D animations.
Fig. 2. The leader board of the competition
This competition was designed to disseminate the results achieved in OpenDR with Webots and webots.cloud and to encourage researchers to use these free and open-source tools to share their research results online. It has been successful in terms of participation and we are currently in touch with several researchers willing to run their own competition or benchmark on webots.cloud.
Authored by Olivier Michel
Cyberbotics Ltd., Switzerland