Voronoi Based Strategic Positioning for Robot Soccer

Strategic positioning is a decisive part of the team play within a soccer game. In most solutions the positioning techniques are treated as a constituent of a complete team play strategy. In a comprehensive overview we discuss the team play and positioning methods used within RoboCup and extract the essential requirements for player positioning. In this work, we propose an approach for strategic positioning allowing for flexible formulation of arbitrary strategies. Based on the conditions of a specific strategy, the field is subdivided in regions by a Voronoi tessellation and each region is assigned a weight. Those weights influence the calculation of the optimal robot position as well as the path. A team play strategy can be expressed by the choice of the tessellation as well as the choice of the weights. This provides a powerful abstraction layer simplifying the design of the actual play strategy. We also present an implementation of an example strategy based on this approach and analyze the performance of our approach in simulation.