UT Austin Villa 2011: a champion agent in the RoboCup 3D soccer simulation competition

This paper presents the architecture and key components of a simulated humanoid robot soccer team, UT Austin Villa, which was designed to compete in the RoboCup 3D simulation competition. These key components include (1) an omnidirectional walk engine and associated walk parameter optimization framework, (2) an inverse kinematics based kicking architecture, and (3) a dynamic role assignment and positioning system. UT Austin Villa won the RoboCup 2011 3D simulation competition in convincing fashion by winning all 24 games it played. During the course of the competition the team scored 136 goals while conceding none. We analyze the effect of each component in isolation and show through extensive experiments that the complete team significantly outperforms all the other teams from the competition.