Report on RoboCup Federation Project “the Research Challenge”

This summary reports main efforts and results in the RoboCup Federation project “the Research Challenge”. The original motivation of the project was to establish an abstract and simplified 2D competition as a research challenge of the 2D league. We have tried to fulfill the goal through a middleware that implements a set of high-level actions, instead of the soccer server primitive actions, for the agents. This allows one to concentrate on “high-level” research issues such as decision-making in a multi-agent setting as well as agent cooperation. It provides a new bridge for linking RoboCup competitions with the related basic research in AI and Robotics, such as planning and machine learning.