Cooperative behaviors in multi-robot systems through implicit communication

We illustrate the Cooperation through Implicit Communication behavior-based approach used for developing the PaSo-Team (The University of Padua Simulated Soccer Robot Team), a multi-robot software system for soccer robot competitions promoted by the RoboCup Simulation League. The configuration of the environment, namely the robots' relative positions depending on both the global task and the game dynamics, provides a source of implicit information about the robots' intention to be involved in collective actions, making them able to cooperate implicitly. The soccer team performance can be tuned by triggering the arbitration module of any single robot to generate, as many as possible, suitable situations which hint to the team the action of scoring the goal. Some macroscopic parameters can be usefully introduced to evaluate the evolution of the whole multi-robot software system. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All right reserved.