Setplays: achieving coordination by the appropriate use of arbitrary pre-defined flexible plans and inter-robot communication

Multi-agent coordination and strategic planning are two of the major research topics in the context of RoboCup. However, innovations in these areas are often developed and applied to only one domain and a single RoboCup league, without proper generalization. Also, although the importance of the concept of Setplay, to structure the team’s behaviour, has been recognized by many researchers, no general framework for the development and execution of generic Setplays has been presented in the context of RoboCup. This paper presents such a framework for highlevel setplay definition and execution, applicable to any RoboCup cooperative league and similar domains. The framework is based in a standard, league-independent and flexible language that defines setplays which may be interpreted and executed at run-time through the use of inter-robot communication. The implementation of this framework in the 3D simulation league is also described with concrete examples of Setplay definition, management and execution. The first results achieved show the usefulness of this approach and motivate us to use it as the main coordination of all our teams participating in the simulation, small-size, middle-size and legged leagues of RoboCup.