Purposeful Behavior in Robot Soccer Team Play

The annual robot soccer competition (RoboCup) provides an excellent opportunity for research in distributed robotic systems. A robotic soccer team demands integrated robots that are autonomous, efficient, cooperative, and intelligent. To achieve autonomy, robots must have all necessary capabilities on board, i.e., perception, propulsion, communication, navigation, and decision making. Their control software must be reactive enough for robustness and adaptation, yet deliberative enough for goal-oriented mission tasks. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Purposeful Behavior, to tackle the problem of achieving reactive and coordinated behavior in a team of autonomous robots. We are building a new control framework for autonomous robots to reason about goals and actions, react to unexpected situations, learn from humans and experience, and collaborate with teammates. Building such robots may require techniques that are different from those employed in separate research disciplines. We describe our experience in building these soccer robots and highlights problems and solutions that are unique to such multi-agent robotic systems in general. These problems include a framework for multi-agent programming, agent modeling and architecture, evaluation of multiagent systems, and decentralized skill composition.