Designing distributed control architecture for cooperative multi-agent system and its real-time application to soccer robot

Abstract

The soccer robot system consists of multi-agents, with highly coordinated operations and movements so as to fulfill specific objectives, even under adverse situations. The coordination of the multi-agent is associated with a lot of supplementary work in advance. The associated issues are the position correction, prevention of communication congestion, local information sensing in addition to the need for imitating the human-like decision making. A control structure for soccer robot is designed and several behaviors and actions for a soccer robot are proposed. The action selection mechanism (ASM) is proposed as a high-level controller and is applied to a one-on-one soccer game. The intervention module of ASM uses multilayer perceptrons and its effectiveness is shown by experimental results. Modified zone defense as a basic strategy and several special strategies for fouls as applied to SOTY and MIRO teams for MIROSOT are discussed. The authors have been placed in the second and fourth positions in MIROSOT'96 (Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament) held at KAIST in November 1996, with the proposed scheme and micro-robots.