(logo by Janette Forte)
This is the official site of
the UT
Austin Villa 3D Simulation team from
the Department of Computer
Science at the University of
Texas at Austin.
This page provides information on a kicking engine which was an important component in UT
Austin Villa winning the 2011 RoboCup 3D simulation
competition. Results from the competition, including videos of game
action, are linked off the UT Austin Villa homepage. The remainder of
this page focuses only on the kicking engine.
For the 2011 RoboCup 3D simulation competition UT Austin Villa used a
kick engine to perform different kicks. The kicks were designed by
defining waypoints relative to the ball for the foot to reach along
its kicking trajectory. Cubic Hermite splines are then used to compute
the path for the foot to follow as it moves between the
waypoints. Before executing a kick, the robot first checks to see if
its foot can reach all the points in the kicking motion trajectory
through the use of inverse kinematics. The positions of the waypoints
relative to the ball were hand-tuned and then optimized through the
CMA-ES algorithm. Below are videos of the system in action.
Different Kicks
Different kicks used by the kick engine.
Download video: mp4
Kick Optimization
Optimization run of a forward kick. The fitness of the agent is
determined by how far it can kick the ball forward averaged over ten
kick attempts. The agent fails the kick attempt and receives a
negative reward if it runs into the ball before kicking it or takes
too long trying to line up the kick. The optimization is run in simulation time which is much faster than real time.
Download video: mp4
For any questions, please
contact Patrick MacAlpine.