ÜberSim: A Multi-Robot Simulator for Robot Soccer

A realistic simulation engine can be a powerful tool for speeding up the software development time cycle for robot control systems. To be useful, the simulation engine must capture, at a suitable level of resolution, the interfaces, structure and dynamics of the real world that are important to the performance of the control system. In this paper, we present a new multi-robot simulation engine, called ÜberSim, for simulating games of robot soccer. The goal of ÜberSim is to create a simulation environment that enables control systems to be developed rapidly and transferred to the real system with minimal change in behavior. For robot soccer, where dynamics play an integral role in robot behavior, ÜberSim must capture at a reasonable level of resolution the physical interactions between the robots, field, and ball. Thus, ÜberSim has been built on top of a high-fidelity physics simulation engine that models friction between object surfaces, elastic collisions between objects, and finite accelerations of objects with non-negligible mass and rotational inertia. We present the details of ÜberSim in its current form and describe its use for developing robot control systems. As a means to evaluate the simulation, we present some empirical comparisons between the performance of robots operating in the ÜberSim simulation and robots operating in the real world.