Moving robotics competitions virtual: The case study of RoboCupJunior Soccer Simulation (SoccerSim)

For almost 25 years, the goal of the RoboCup has been to build soccer robots capable of winning against the FIFA World Champion of 2050. To foster the participation of the next generation of roboticists, the RoboCupJunior competition takes place in parallel and provides a similar challenge of appropriate difficulty for high school students. RoboCupJunior has three main categories: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage. For the Soccer category, participants need to design, build and program a team of autonomous robots to play soccer against an opponent team of robots. The competition is physical in nature, since it assumes physical robots playing against one another. In 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for a competition of this type to take place, due to obvious restrictions on physical gatherings. To allow for some sort of participation, and inspired by positive experience of the larger RoboCup community, the Organizing Committee of RoboCupJunior Soccer has explored porting a portion of the challenge to a simulated environment. Many of the existing environments, however, are built for higher education/research teams competitions or research, making them complex to de