Opponent-driven planning and execution for pass, attack, and defense in a multi-robot soccer team

Abstract

We present our Small Size League (SSL) robot soccer team, CMDragons, which performed strongly at the RoboCup’13 competition, placing second out of twenty teams after a pro-longed final match ending in penalty shoot-outs. We briefly present the robots ’ hardware and individual skills, and then focus on our multi-robot passing, attack, and defense plan-ning and execution in the challenging SSL adversarial multi-robot environment. We introduce a pass-ahead behavior, as well as a new dynamic two-stage planner, Coerce and Attack, which explicitly considers opponent defense to hy-pothetical attack patterns. The Coerce stage generates a coerce attack formation to coerce the opponent robots into leaving strategic openings. The Attack stage modifies the coerce attack pattern in a fluid manner to exploit openings in the defense using pass-ahead to attempt to score. We further present our threat-based defensive multi-robot al-gorithm which identifies potential threats based on the op-ponent positioning, and plans the defense accordingly. We present the performance of CMDragons at RoboCup’13 in terms of metrics that evaluate the effectiveness of the low-level skills as well as the high-level defense and offense.