The real robotic environment is different from the simulator in several aspects. The main differences result from the fact that the agents here are real physical artifacts that occupy space, do not control the ball carefully, and have rather unreliable accurate motion. The robots' motion is quite crude manipulating the ball, as they cannot hold it, but act on the ball simply by pushing it with their mostly flat sides.
The constraints in the real robot team therefore involve two main aspects on the position of the passive agent:
Figure 4.3(a) and (b) illustrate these two constraints and Figure 4.3(c) shows the combination of these two set of constraints and the resulting position of the anticipating passive teammate.
Figure 8: Constraints for the anticipation algorithm for the CMUnited-98
small robot team; in (a) and (b) we show three opponents robots,
and the current position of the ball corresponding also to the
position of the active teammate; in (c) we illustrate the position of the
passive agent, dark square, as returned by our anticipation algorithm.
Using this anticipation algorithm, the attacking team agents behaved in an exemplary collaborative fashion. Their motion on the field was a beautiful response to the dynamically changing adversarial environment. The active and passive agents moved in great coordination using the anticipation algorithm increasing very significantly successful collaboration.