Robocup-99 Team Descriptions Essex Wizards Essex-wizards

This article is to describe the Essex Wizards team attending the simulation league of RoboCup'99 in Stockholm. A long-term research goal of this team is to focus on cooperative behaviours, team roles and formations , sensor fusion and machine learning capabilities. Therefore, the initial eeorts for participating at RoboCup'99 are mainly concentrated on a multi-threaded implementation to simulated soccer agents for the RoboCup competition in order to meet the timing requirements set by the RoboCup soccer server simulator. Since robot agents work at three distinct phases: sensing, thinking and acting, POSIX threads are adopted to break down these phases and implement them concurrently. Implementation results have shown that it outperforms traditional single-threaded approaches in terms of eeciency, responsiveness and scalability. To handle a complex, dynamic, adversari-al environment like the one of a football game, this article also describes how machine learning techniques and agent technology have been used in the current implementation, to tackle the decision-making and cooperation problems. By gathering useful experience from earlier stages, an agent can signiicantly improve its performance and by distributing the responsibilities among the agents, an eecient way of cooperation emerges.