Plays as team plans for coordination and adaptation

Abstract

Coordinated action for a team of robots is a challenging problem, especially in dynamic, unpredictable environments. In the context of robot soccer, a complex domain with teams of robots in an adversarial setting, there is a great deal of uncertainty in the opponent's behavior and capabilities. We introduce the concept of a play as a team plan, which combines both reactive principles, which are the focus of traditional approaches for coordinating actions, and deliberative principles. We introduce the concept of a playbook as a method for seamlessly combining multiple team plans. The playbook provides a set of alternative team behaviors which form the basis for our third contribution of play adaptation. We describe how these concepts were concretely implemented in the CMDragons robot soccer team. We also show empirical results indicating the importance of adaptation in adversarial or other unpredictable environments.