Coordinated Team Play in the Four-Legged RoboCup League

For a decade now, the RoboCup competition promotes research in robotics through soccer games between autonomous robot teams. The ability to coordinate the players within such a team of robots is the key to the success of the team. Team coordination in a human soccer game is achieved through various team formations, tactics, and strategies. Unfortunately, research in the four-legged RoboCup league has focused mostly on single player skills, demonstrating only limited results in coordinated team play. In our work, we adapt and transfer formations, tactics, and strategies used by human soccer teams, such as the popular 4-4-2 scheme, to our four-legged RoboCup team Kouretes. We define roles for each player in all the cases we consider and we implement these roles using Petri Net Plans (PNP). The assignment of appropriate roles to players is performed dynamically during the game depending on the current game state using a simple communication scheme and a finite state machine. Our approach is implemented and tested on our four-legged RoboCup team. The proposed coordination scheme can be generalized and used in various robot team applications beyond robotic soccer, such as planetary exploration and search-and-rescue missions.