2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012

2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012

The 2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012 Daniele Loiacono, Luigi Cardamone, and Pier Luca Lanzi


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


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


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

The Open Racing Car Simulator


The Open Racing Car Simulator & the Competition Software

TORCS

BOT BOT BOT

TORCS PATCH

SBOT SBOT SBOT

BOT BOT BOT

UDP UDP UDP q  The competition server

q  Separates the bots from TORCS q  Build a well-defined sensor model q  Works in real-time


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


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

Competitors


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


Ho Duc Thang University of Nottingham


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


Kyung-Joong Kim Jun-ho Seo Tae-seong Kim Sejong Univ, Korea

BFB4


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


Jan Quadflieg, Tim Delbruegger and Mike Preuss TU Dortmund

Mr Racer


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


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


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


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

Qualifying


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

Emero


Qualifying: Emero

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000

Autopia

BFB4

Ho

Mariscal&Fernandez

Mr. Racer

Ready2Win

NO-‐NOISY NOISY

Dirt-1

Kerameikos


Qualifying: Kerameikos

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000

Autopia

BFB4

Ho

Mariscal&Fernandez

Mr. Racer

Ready2Win

NO-‐NOISY

NOISY

Dirt-1

Mikegrady


Qualifying: Mikegrady

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000

Autopia

BFB4

Ho

Mariscal&Fernandez

Mr. Racer

Ready2Win

NO-‐NOISY

NOISY


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


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

Races


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


And the winner is…

Mr. Racer

TU Dortmund


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

Final Results

Next leg @ CIG-2012 in Granada (Spain)

Compe&tor Evo* Gecco CIG Total Autopia 39 35 ? 74 Ready2Win 19 20 ? 39 Mariscal&Fernandez 20 18,5 ? 38.5 Mr. Racer 16.5 18 ? 34.5 Ho 0 13 ? 13 BFB4 0 11 ? 11

Championship

Thank you! SCR Contacts Official Webpage http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/competitions/scr/ Email [email protected] Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/racingcompetition