In this paper we have presented our work investigating and introducing the concept of anticipation to increase collaboration in teams of agents. We have been working in the concrete domain of robotic soccer.
We have presented our basic flexible team architecture in which individual agents flexibly move within their role as a function of the position of the ball to try to optimize their individual actions towards the ball. We then introduce a novel anticipation algorithm that allows for team agents to strategically position themselves in anticipation of possible collaboration needs from other teammates. We used this new anticipation algorithm in our RoboCup-98 teams achieving very successful results.
Given that we have developed algorithms for individual action and team collaboration anticipation, the current on-going step on our research agenda is to develop algorithms to anticipate the actions of the opponent agents and effectively react to them.