Individual and collaborative behaviors in a team of homogeneous robotic soccer agents

Abstract

Robotic soccer is a new challenging multi-agent domain, in which agents need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. We describe CMUnited-97, our team of robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We first discuss the challenges underlying the robotic soccer domain as a multi-agent system. We then introduce our team architecture, briefly describe the system's perception, and present the robots' actions ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors. The robots can organize themselves in formations, hold specific roles, and pursue their goals. In game situations, they extensively used their role-based behaviors, and demonstrated collaboration on multiple occasions. As homogeneous agents, the robots can also switch roles to maximize the overall performance of the team. CMUnited-97 won the RoboCup-97 small-robot competition at IJCAI in Nagoya, Japan.