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. The paper focuses on multi-agent coordination for both perception and action. The contributions of this work 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 to respond to large range of situations in an appropriate way, 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 multi-robot group, which is able to play soccer successfully. In addition, the developed methods promise to advance the state of the art in the multi-robot field.