rSoccer: A Framework for Studying Reinforcement Learning in Small and Very Small Size Robot Soccer

Understand

Reinforcement learning is an active research area with a vast number of applications in robotics, and the RoboCup competition is an interesting environment for studying and evaluating reinforcement learning methods.

• A known difficulty in applying reinforcement learning to robotics is the high number of experience samples required, being the use of simulated environments for training the agents followed by transfer learning to real-world (sim-to-real) a viable path.
• This article introduces an open-source simulator for the IEEE Very Small Size Soccer and the Small Size League optimized for reinforcement learning experiments.
• We also propose a framework for creating OpenAI Gym environments with a set of benchmarks tasks for evaluating single-agent and multi-agent robot soccer skills.