Coordination Without Negotiation in Teams of Heterogeneous Robots

A key feature of human cooperation is that we can coordinate well without communication or negotiation. We achieve this by anticipating the intentions and actions of others, and adapting our own actions to them accordingly. In contrast, most multi-robot systems rely on extensive communication to exchange their intentions. This paper describes the joint approach of our two research groups to enable a heterogeneous team of robots to coordinate implicitly, without negotiation. We apply implicit coordination to a typical coordination task from robotic soccer: regaining ball possession. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of implicit coordination, and evaluate it by conducting several experiments with our robotic soccer teams.