Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Communication languages and protocols, to convey the most relevant information
at the right times to players have also been developed. Also, research is focused on
intelligent control of players' sensors to achieve maximum coordination and world
state accuracy. Online optimization has been used in order to develop a complete set
of efficient low-level skills for soccer playing agents and applied in FC Portugal 2d
and 3d teams [8-10].
Coaching is an important research topic in RoboCup. We have proposed Coach
Unilang - a general language to coach a (robo)soccer team [11]. Our coach conveys
strategic information to players, while keeping their individual decision autonomy.
We are also working on a coach agent capable to calculate high-level match statistics
that may useful for teams to develop opponent modeling approaches [12-14].
FC Portugal is also very concerned with the development of agent evaluation tools
like our offline client methodology; WstateMetrics that evaluates the accuracy of
world states and Visual debugger used to analyze the reasoning of agents[1, 15].
Evaluation by domain experts using graphical tools is one of the methodologies that
we are also pursuing.
We have also developed a framework for high-level setplay definition and execu-
tion, applicable to any RoboCup cooperative league and similar domains. The frame-
work is based in a standard, league-independent and flexible language that defines
setplays, which may be interpreted and executed at run-time [16-18].
This paper presents an overview of the main coordination methodologies devel-
oped for robotic soccer and similar applications with emphasis for the methodologies
developed by the FC Portugal RoboCup team. More information about FC Portugal
research may be found on the team published papers such as [1-40].
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 contains a description of the RoboCup
international initiative and its interest for researching in coordination of multi-robot
teams. Section 3 contains a survey concerning coordination of multi-robot teams.
Section 4 presents a brief overview of the research concerning strategic positioning
and formations and on the way to perform flexible setplays for coordinating a
robo soccer team. Finally some conclusions and future work are described in the last
section.
2
RoboCup International Initiative
RoboCup is an international initiative that aims to motivate the research on multi
agent systems and intelligent robotics [41]. The RoboCup Federation organizes every
year scientific meetings and world robotic competitions in the fields of robotic soccer,
robotic search and rescuing, and domestic robots. Some competitions use simulated
environments while others use real robots.
In the soccer domain there are the Simulation League 2D and Simulation League
3D competitions, and several real robots soccer competitions, including the Middle-
Size League, Small Size League, Standard Platform League (based on Nao humanoid
robot from Aldebaran) and Humanoid League. The rescue competitions include the
simulated Agent competition and Virtual competition and also a real robot Rescue
League. In the field of domestic robots the competition is performed using real robots
and it is called RoboCup@Home League.
