CS Freiburg: Coordinating robots for successful soccer playing

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain because many different research areas have to be addressed in order to create a successful team of robot players. This paper presents the CS Freiburg team, the winner in the middle-size league at RoboCup 1998, 2000, and 2001. This paper focuses on multiagent coordination for both perception and action: The contributions of this paper are new methods for tracking ball and players observed by multiple robots, team coordination methods for strategic team formation and dynamic role assignment, a rich set of basic skills allowing robots to respond to a large range of situations in an appropriate way, and an action-selection method based on behavior networks, as well as a method to learn the skills and their selection. As demonstrated by evaluations of the different methods and by the success of the team, these methods permit the creation of a multirobot group which is able to play soccer successfully. In addition, the developed methods promise to advance the state of the art in the multirobot field.