Reading the Game

A team of relatively simple robots may achieve a complex goal more effectively than a single complex robot if a proper design paradigm is used. Multirobot systems have a wide application area from search and rescue operations in disaster areas and planetary exploration to soccer playing. Robot soccer is a good platform to test and develop multi-robot applications because it has some physical limitations such as limited and noisy sensorial information and noisy actuators as in the real life and it also has a highly dynamic environment. The ultimate goal of winning the game should be decomposed into a sequence of sub-goals and proper sequences of actions for achieving the subgoals should be selected and refined through execution. In order to be able to select proper actions at a time, the system should be able to evaluate the current state therefore some metrics that gives quantitative information about the environment are needed. This book presents a set of metrics calculated from positions of robots and ball on the field, and a statistical method for evaluating their usefulness. A task allocation algorithm built on top of those metrics is also presented.