Shooting a moving ball is crucial for high-level collaborative and adversarial action in the soccer domain. The learned shooting behavior is robust in that it works for different ball speeds and trajectories, and it is situation independent in that it works for different action quadrants and goal locations. These qualities enable it to be used as a basis for higher level behaviors.
Although soccer players must first learn low-level skills, soccer is inherently a strategic, high-level task: a team of the best-skilled individual players in the world would be easily beaten if they could not work together. Similarly, an unskilled team that works together to exploit a weakness of a better team, will often be able to prevail.
This section describes how the robust shooting template developed in Section 4 can be built upon in both collaborative and adversarial directions. In particular, from a collaborative standpoint, the learned shooting skill can be used by the passer as well. Rather than passing a stationary ball to the shooter, the passer can redirect a moving ball in exactly the same way as the shooter, only aiming at a point in front of the shooter instead of at the goal. On the other hand, adversarial issues can be studied by introducing a defender which tries to block the shooter's attempts.