  The FC Portugal 3D team is developed upon the structure of our previous
Simulation league 2D/3D teams and our standard platform league team. Our
research concerning the robot low-level skills is focused on developing
behaviors that may be applied on real robots with minimal adaptation using
model-based approaches. Our research on high-level soccer coordination
methodologies and team playing is mainly focused on the adaptation of
previously developed methodologies from our 2D soccer teams to the 3D humanoid
environment and on creating new coordination methodologies based on the
previously developed ones. The research-oriented development of our team has
been pushing it to be one of the most competitive over the years (World
champion in 2000 and Coach Champion in 2002, European champion in 2000 and
2001, Coach 2nd place in 2003 and 2004, European champion in Rescue Simulation
and Simulation 3D in 2006, World Champion in Simulation 3D in Bremen 2006 and
European champion in 2007, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015). This paper describes
some of the main innovations of our 3D simulation league team during the last
years. A new generic framework for reinforcement learning tasks has also been
developed. The current research is focused on improving the above-mentioned
framework by developing new learning algorithms to optimize low-level skills,
such as running and sprinting. We are also trying to increase student contact
by providing reinforcement learning assignments to be completed using our new
framework, which exposes a simple interface without sharing low-level
implementation details.
