Prioritized Role Assignment for Marking

This paper presents a system for marking or covering players on an opposing soccer team so as to best prevent them from scoring. A basis for the marking system is the introduction of prioritized role assignment, an extension to SCRAM dynamic role assignment used by the UT Austin Villa RoboCup 3D simulation team for formational positioning. The marking system is designed to allow for decentralized coordination among physically realistic simulated humanoid soccer playing robots in the partially observable, non-deterministic, noisy, dynamic, and limited communication setting of the RoboCup 3D simulation league simulator. Although it is discussed in the context of the RoboCup 3D simulation environment, the marking system is not domain specific and can readily be employed in other RoboCup leagues as prioritized role assignment generalizes well to many realistic and real-world multiagent systems.