Emergence of multiagent spatial coordination strategies through artificial coevolution

This paper describes research investigating the evolution of coordination strategies in robot soccer teams. Each player (viewed as an agent) is provided with a common set of skills and is assigned to perform over a delimited area inside a soccer field. The idea is to optimize the whole team behavior by means of a spatial coadaptation process in which new players are selected in such a way to comply with the already existing ones. The main results show that, through coevolution, we progressively create teams whose members act on complementary areas of the playing field, being capable of prevailing over a standard opponent team with a fixed formation.