The SimuroSot Strategy Development Kit: a high-level approach to robot soccer coding

Abstract

Robot soccer is a robot soccer category competition at FIRA. Robot soccer teams lacks though a formal programming procedure in order to standardize and properly model game strategies. Such lack of standardization causes several limitations on the competition as a science promoter, namely: (1) the difficulty of understanding other's code, (2) absence of abstraction for the conceiving of game strategies, (3) need for high programming skills in order to produce effective game strategies and (4) lack of clear separation between robots moving primitives and specific application domain concerns. In a previous paper, we have proposed a two-level semi-formal specification to provide game strategies modeling to robot teams in SimuroSot category. This paper presents the SimuroSot Development Kit, a visual tool which implements such specification and enables complete visual programming of robot strategies and subsequent automatic code generation in Lingo programming language. Experimentation scenarios with volunteers of different knowledge levels and formation have been settled. Results show that both specification and tool improve the learning curve of robot teams programming.