17.2 RoboCup 2022

RoboCup (www.robocup.org) is an international scientific initiative with the goal of advancing the state of the art of intelligent Robots, AI and Automation. The hosting country of RoboCup rotates around various continents. This year is the turn for Asia and Thailand receives the honor to host the event under the name RoboCup 2022, Bangkok, Thailand at BITEC Hall 98 - 100 (https://2022.robocup.org/)

This was also the first year WITS attended in person as a result of the reduced COVID19 restrictions.

The Wits FC team consisted of:

Branden Ingram
Andries Bingani
Michael Beukman 
Dr. Pravesh Ranchod

The RoboCup 2022 Soccer Simulation 3D was amazing! Ten teams competed for five days in the central Soccer Competition. Teams were also challenged with a set of Technical Challenges.

The Free Scientific Challenge is a competition where teams present a one-page paper and a 5-minute presentation of one of their main scientific contributions to the league in the last year. A jury composed of each team leader and two invited experts evaluates and votes on the best contributions.

The Fat Proxy challenge invites teams to adapt their codes to use more abstract commands in the simulator, like Simulation 2D league. The magma’s Fat Proxy enables teams to use commands similar to dash and kick used in the 2D simulator to run in the original 3D Simulator. Teams from 2D and 3D leagues can participate in this challenge.

See the complete results of the competition and challenges here (https://cloud.robocup.org/s/ifX7TDsaHpCFWWH).

Round 0:

Round 1:

Round 2:

Finals:

Although our scoring has not increased between 2021 and 2022 we were happy to observe a noticeable catching up between ourselves and the other teams. Across the board goal differences improved with draws against Bahia and KgpKubs being the highlight of the tournament.

FatProxy:

Over the year between 2021 and 2022 the teams focus was very much on the learning better kicks and walks headed up by Michael Beukman. However, we wanted make an attempt to participate in the Fat Proxy competition once again. During the tournament we made extensive improvements of our behaviour which could utilize the kicks and walking of fatproxy. This included an optimised passing procedure. The results above demonstrated that our strategic planning is not far behind even the best teams. The highlight being the win over Bahia and the close loss to UT.

Overall Standings