Intelligent Interactive Technology
RoboCup:
Teamwork Simulation and Real-time Automated Reasoning
The Simulation League of the RoboCup is a standard competition platform where teams of software agents play against each other. As in the real game, "players" have only fragmented, localised and imprecise information of the field, and must respond to actions and events in limited time. They must make autonomous decisions and act in collaboration with members of their own team but in opposition to the other team.
Multi-agent interactions lead to emergent patterns in overall system behaviour. In general, emergent behaviour cannot be predicted or even envisioned from knowledge of what each component does in isolation. But we can attempt to actually construct artificial surrogates for complex (real-world scalable) processes and carry out the repeatable, controllable, scientific experiments needed in order to obtain viable theories of complex systems and apply them to real-world problems.
Cyberoos is a team of synthetic (software) agents designed to compete in the RoboCup Simulation League. Previous generations of Cyberoos have been developed according to a hierarchy of logic-based agent architectures, which initially captured certain types of situated behaviour (Cyberoos'98) and then some basic classes of more complex tactical behaviour (Cyberoos'99). Cyberoos'2000 exhibited emergent tactical teamwork. Cyberoos'2001 is the fourth "generation" designed in line with this framework. Cyberoos'2001 agents incorporate a domain model and inter-agent communications into the architecture. For the first time in our four years long experiment, we can now observe and directly compare behaviour produced by agents using domain models and purely reactive agents. This comparative analysis is the primary topic of our research.
The hierarchical behaviour-based architecture is based on the Deep Behaviour Projection framework. The DBP agent architecture ensures that more advanced levels capture relevant behaviour more concisely than their deeper projections.
Cyberoos'98 won third place in the Pacific Rim Simulation League, winning four out of seven games with a total score 26:14.
Cyberoos'99 finished in the top 18 of the final stage of 1999 World Cup tournament (from over 70 teams), winning five out of ten games and outscoring their opponents 97:15.
Cyberoos'2000 reached semi-finals and finished 4th out of 15 teams at the European RoboCup-2000 championship in Amsterdam, outscoring their opponents 72:18 in 9 games.
At the World RoboCup-2000, held in Melbourne, Cyberoos'2000 shared 9th place out of 40 teams, and 2nd place in the 2000 Pacific Rim rankings (out of 16 teams).
At the most recent World RoboCup, held in Seattle in 2001, Cyberoos'2001 also shared 9th place - this time among 44 teams, winning 8 times out of 10.
The overall Cyberoos progress can be traced here.
To toplast updated
March 15, 2005 11:52 AM
Mikhail.Prokopenko@cmis.csiro.au