Tackling the 3D Simulation League: an interview with Klaus Dorer and Stefan Glaser - Robohub

The RoboCup Soccer 3D Simulation League is a competition where teams control simulated Nao robots in an 11 versus 11 soccer match, with detailed motor-level control mimicking real robots. Unlike the 2D Simulation League, which focuses on simplified physics and team strategy, the 3D League aims for a more realistic robotic simulation. Currently, the league uses SimSpark, a simulator developed in the early 2000s that balances physical realism with the computational limitations of its time. However, SimSpark has limitations such as complexity, custom robot models, and communication protocols that hinder wider adoption and make it difficult to translate simulations to real robots. To address these issues, Stefan Glaser has been developing a new simulator based on the MuJoCo physics engine, which has recently become popular in machine learning communities due to its open-source availability and standardized model specifications. MuJoCo supports dynamic manipulation of the simulation environment, a key feature needed for RoboCup’s setup where agents join and form teams