Coaching a robot collective

This paper is concerned with a study in which the advantages of telerobotics and supervisory control are combined with those of a multi-robot system, in the context of robot soccer. We propose our solutions to two important issues in such systems, namely, the level of abstraction at which the commands to a robot collective are issued, and the selection of the group within the collective to direct the commands. The design philosophy as well as its implementation are described. We show through experiments that, statistically, a supervised robot soccer team out-performs an unsupervised team, with the help of coaching advices. The proposed approach has applications beyond robotic soccer.