Manuela Veloso, Peter Stone, and Michael Bowling
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213
Submitted to the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents, October 1998
We investigate teams of
complete autonomous agents that can collaborate towards achieving
precise objectives in an adversarial dynamic environment. We have
pursued this work in the context of robotic soccer both in simulation
and with real physical robots. We briefly present these two frameworks
emphasizing their different technical challenges. Creating
effective members of a team is a challenging research problem. We
first address this issue by introducing a team architecture
organization which allows for a rich task decomposition between team
members. The main contribution of this paper is our recent
introduction of an action selection algorithm that allows for a
teammate to anticipate the needs of other teammates.
Anticipation is critical for maximizing the probability of successful
collaboration in teams of agents. We present our team organization
architecture and the anticipation algorithm. We show how our
contribution applies to the two concrete robotic soccer
frameworks. Anticipation was used in both our CMUnited-98 simulator
and CMUnited-98 small-robot teams in the RoboCup-98 competition held
jointly with ICMAS in July 1998. The two teams are RoboCup world
champions each in its own league. Anticipation was one of major
differences between our team and the other teams.
keywords: multi-agent coordination and collaboration,
multi-agent teams, autonomous robots, coordinating perception,
thought, and action