A fuzzy based hierarchical coordination and control system for a robotic agent team in the robot Hockey competition

This paper presents the system used by the team of the German University in Cairo (GUC) within the FESTO Hockey Challenge league that took place within RoboCup 2009. The goal of the FESTO Hockey Challenge is to have a competition between robotic teams where each team consists of three robots to compete in an Ice Hockey game. All robots are of the same mechanical, sensor and electronic capabilities so that the focus of the competition is to develop novel artificial intelligence techniques for robot control and coordination. The GUC team scored the 2^nd place in this competition after losing by penalty shoot outs in the final. The proposed control approach for GUC team employed Hierarchical Fuzzy Logic Controllers (HFLCs) in which the low level behaviours are implemented using FLCs and the coordination between the behaviours is implemented by a high level fuzzy layer. The coordination between the robotic agents team members is implemented by a hierarchical situation based dynamic role allocation mechanism. The paper will describe the employed approaches and will report on the results achieved.