Second leg of the 2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship held during GECCO-2012
More information at
http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/competitions/scr/
http://groups.google.com/group/racingcompetition
http://www.geccocompetitions.com
Organizers
Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano
Luigi Cardamone, Politecnico di Milano
Pier Luca Lanzi, Politecnico di Milano
Boost Fertility New Invention Ups Success Rates.pdf
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
1. The 2012 Simulated Car Racing
Championship @ GECCO-2012
Daniele Loiacono, Luigi Cardamone, and Pier Luca Lanzi
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
2. 2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship
9 races during 3 conferences
Develop a driver for TORCS
(hand-coded, learned, evolved, …)
Drivers will be awarded based on their score
in each conference competition
At the end, the team with highest overall score
wins the championship
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
3. Roadmap of the 2012 Championship
1. EVO*-2012, Malaga (Spain)
April 11-13, 2012
2. ACM GECCO-2012, Philadelphia (US)
July 7-11, 2012
3. IEEE CIG-2012, Granada (Spain)
September 11-14, 2012
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
4. Motivations
q Proposing a relevant game-based competition
" more representative of commercial games AI
" more similar to a real-world problem
q Proposing a funny and exciting competition
" you can see and play with the entries of this competition
" human players can interact with AI
" a lot of programmed AI available for comparison
q Proposing a challenging competition
" computationally expensive
" real-time
" on-line learning
" noisy sensors
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
6. The Open Racing Car Simulator
& the Competition Software
TORCS TORCS
PATCH
BOT BOT BOT SBOT SBOT SBOT
q The competition server
UDP UDP UDP
q Separates the bots from TORCS
q Build a well-defined sensor model
q Works in real-time
BOT BOT BOT
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
7. Sensors and actuators
q Rangefinders for edges on the track and opponents (with noise)
q Speed, RPM, fuel, damage, angle with track, distance race, position
on track, etc.
q Six effectors: steering wheel [-1,+1], gas pedal [0, +1], brake
pedal [0,+1], gearbox {-1,0,1,2,3,4,5,6}, clutch [0,+1], focus
direction
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
8. What is the structure of a race?
Three stages: warm up, qualifiers, actual race
During warm-up, each driver can explore the
track and learn something useful
During qualifiers, each driver races alone against
the clock (the best 8 drivers move to the race)
During the race all the drivers race together
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
10. The competitors
q Three entries:
" Ho Duc Thang, University of Nottingham
" BFB4 - Sejong Univ, Korea
" Mr. Racer, TU Dortmund
q Three reference entries (selected from the top entries of the
past championship) :
" Mariscal & Fernández, Málaga University
" Ready2Win, Slovak University of Technology – FIIT
" AUTOPIA, Madrid and Granada
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
11. Ho Duc Thang
University of Nottingham
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
12. Ho Duc Thang
q Hybrid fuzzy controller with a module to learn the model
track as the car drives, a module to perform some simple
plannings based on the modelled segments of the track and
a fuzzy controller which actually drives the car.
q All the modelling, planning and driving are done during the
race, the warm-up stage is not exploited
q No opponent handling
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
13. BFB4
Kyung-Joong Kim
Jun-ho Seo
Tae-seong Kim
Sejong Univ, Korea
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
14. BFB4
q Programmed Behavior and NN used to
" Simple approach for steering and accelerating
q Jump Detection
" When the Z-Sensor is more than 0.4
" While the car is jumping and landing(few times, 10 tick
count), the steer of car is fixed to forward
q Opponent avoidance:
" Just brake if the opponent is approached on a straight
" Modify the normal steering when the opponent is
approached in a bend
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
15. Mr Racer
Jan Quadflieg, Tim Delbruegger and Mike Preuss
TU Dortmund
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
16. Mr. Racer 2012
q Joined effort of Jan Quadflieg, Tim Delbruegger and Mike
Preuss
q Variables learned offline with the CMA-ES, now including
optimized settings for recovery , the clutch and…
q NEW: Parameters of the opponent handling module have
been optimized
q Optimization of the opponent handling will hopefuly result in
a CIG competition paper
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
17. Noise Handling
1. Low pass filter on sensor
values
2. 2 Regression polynoms are
fitted to each side
3. Resample the polygons
4. Calculate our measure (see
CIG paper 2010)
5. Low pass filter on the last
measurements
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
18. Online Learning during Warmup
q We learn a model of the racetrack
q One of two parameter sets is chosen
q Target speeds for all corners are then fine tuned
q All information is saved at the end of the warmup
q And later used during qualifying and the race
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
19. Opponent Handling
q Noise filtering with a lowpass filter
q Observer module interprets filtered sensor readings
q This leads to a recommended speed and an overtaking line
(created on the fly!)
q Planning module incorporates recommended target speed
and overtaking line into the plan
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
21. Scoring process: Warm-up & Qualifying
q Scoring process involves three tracks:
" Emero(city track)
" Kerameikos (mountain track)
" Mikegrady (hill track)
q The tracks are not distributed with TORCS:
" Generated using the Interactive Track Generator for
TORCS and Speed Dreams available at:
• http://trackgen.pierlucalanzi.net
" The competitors cannot know the tracks
q Each controller raced for 100000 game ticks in the warm-up
stage and then its performance is computed in the qualifying
stage as the distance covered within 10000 game ticks
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
27. Qualifying: Mikegrady
Ready2Win
Mr.
Racer
Mariscal&Fernandez
NO-‐NOISY
NOISY
Ho
BFB4
Autopia
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
28. Qualifying summary (scores with noise)
Driver Emero Kerameikos Mikegrady Total
AUTOPIA 10 10 8 28
Ho Duc Thang 5 8 10 23
Ready2Win 8 6 6 20
Mr. Racer 6 5 5 16
Mariscal & Fernandez 4 4 4 12
BFB4 3 3 3 9
2012 competitors
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
29. What about the qualifying results?
AUTOPIA still the fastest controller…
…but Driver Ho is now very close
Almost all the controllers deal very well with
noise
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
31. Three Tracks
For each track we run 6 races
with different starting grids
Each race is scored using the F1 point system
(10 to first, 8 to second, 6 to third, …)
Two points to the controller with lesser damage
Two points for the fastest lap of the race
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
32. And the winner is…
Mr. Racer
TU Dortmund
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
33. Final Results
Competitor Emero Kerameikos Mikegrady Total
Autopia 12 14 9 35
Ready2Win 6 6 8 20
Mariscal&Fernandez 6,5 7 5 18.5
Mr. Racer 6 5,5 6,5 18
Ho 5 3 5 13
BFB4 3,5 4 3,5 11
Next leg @ CIG-2012 in Granada (Spain)
2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012
35. Thank you!
SCR Contacts
Official Webpage
http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/competitions/scr/
Email
scr2012@sigevolution.org
Google Group
http://groups.google.com/group/racingcompetition