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 @ GECCO-2012

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 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


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


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


BFB4

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

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


Mr Racer

Jan Quadflieg, Tim Delbruegger and Mike Preuss
TU Dortmund


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


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


Qualifying: Emero

Ready2Win

Mr.
Racer

Mariscal&Fernandez
NO-‐NOISY

Ho
NOISY

BFB4

Autopia

0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000


Qualifying: Kerameikos

Ready2Win

Mr.
Racer

Mariscal&Fernandez

NO-‐NOISY

NOISY

Ho

BFB4

Autopia

0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000


Qualifying: Mikegrady

Ready2Win

Mr.
Racer

Mariscal&Fernandez

NO-‐NOISY

NOISY

Ho

BFB4

Autopia

0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000


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


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


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)


Championship

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

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

2012 Simulated Car Racing Championship @ GECCO-2012

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