Three Years of the RoboCup Standard Platform League Drop-In Player Competition: Creating and Maintaining a Large Scale Ad Hoc Teamwork Robotics Competition

The Standard Platform League is one of the main competitions at the annual RoboCup world championships. In this competition, teams of five humanoid robots play soccer against each other. In 2013, the league began a new competition which serves as a testbed for cooperation without pre-coordination: the Drop-in Player Competition. Instead of homogeneous robot teams that are each programmed by the same people and hence implicitly pre-coordinated, this competition features ad hoc teams, i.e. teams that consist of robots originating from different RoboCup teams and as such running different software. In the article advertised by this extended abstract, we provide an overview of this competition, including its motivation, rules, and how these rules have changed across three iterations of the competition. We also present and analyze the strategies utilized by various drop-in players as well as the results of the first three competitions. The article concludes by suggesting improvements for future competitive evaluations of ad hoc teamwork. To the best of our knowledge, the three Drop-in Player Competitions described in the article are the largest annual ad hoc teamwork robotic experiment to date. Across three years, the competition saw 56 entries from 30 different organizations and consisted of 510 minutes of game time that resulted in approximately 85 robot hours.