Competition Record Action

This is a composite action designed to be used with Webots competitions. It records a participant's performance in a competition, as well as an animation of the participant's robot in action. This action is able to detect whether the GitHub runner being used is capable of GPU acceleration (e.g. if using a self-hosted runner). Additionally, there is an optional setting that allows for the changes to be pushed to webots.cloud at the end of the evaluation.

For more information on Webots competitions please refer to the competition template here.

Inputs

Mandatory

Name	Description
participant_repo_id	The ID of the participant repository
participant_repo_name	The name of the participant repository
participant_repo_private	Whether the participant repository is private
log_url	The URL of GitHub action logs
repo_token	Token used to fetch the participant repository, typically REPO_TOKEN

Note that a more privileged token than GITHUB_TOKEN is required to fetch controllers from private repositories.

Optional

Name	Description	Default
upload_performance	Whether to upload the performance to webots.cloud	false

Python Code Pipeline

First, the competition's webots.yml file is parsed to get several competition parameters. It then detects if the GitHub runner has GPU capabilities. Finally the script performs the following steps:

1. Fetch the participant's controller

A Participant class is defined to store all the information about a participant and to download its controller files. The controller to be tested is initialized using the participant_repo_id, participant_repo_name and participant_repo_private inputs.

2. Run Webots and Record Animations

We create a temporary storage directory /tmp and modify the world file to add a Supervisor running the animator.py controller and we set the robot's controller to <extern>.

We then run Webots and the participant's controller inside Docker containers. We first launch Webots and when it is waiting for a connection of an external controller, we launch the controller container.

The animator records and saves the animation files and the competition performance in the temporary storage.

If the competition is in a ranking format, the controller keeps on dueling the controller above it in the ranking until it loses in a bubble-sort logic.

The JSON animation file is renamed as animation.json and is moved to a directory storage/{id}. The participants.json file is also updated with the new recorded performance.

3. Upload performance to webots.cloud (if UPLOAD_PERFORMANCE is set)

If UPLOAD_PERFORMANCE is set, animation.json and the updated participants.json are uploaded to webots.cloud.

Workflow

Here is a GitHub workflow snippet which uses the composite action:

- name: Record and update animations
  uses: cyberbotics/competition-record-action@main
  with:
    participant_repo_id: ${{ env.PARTICIPANT_REPO_ID }}
    participant_repo_name: ${{github.event.client_payload.repository}}
    participant_repo_private: ${{env.PARTICIPANT_REPO_PRIVATE}}
    log_url: ${{ env.LOG_URL }}
    repo_token: ${{ secrets.REPO_TOKEN }}
    upload_performance: false