Planning coordinated motions in robot soccer match

A robot soccer match poses an interesting problem in planning: the planning of coordinated motion of individual players as a team, against the opponent players the next move of which is not known a priori, in such a way as to achieve the common goal, i.e. winning the match. The outcome of a soccer match depends largely on how well the motions of individual players of a team are coordinated against those of the opponent. The technical challenge lies in formulating such coordination strategy together with computational formalism that allows a real-time search for an optimal coordinated motion of individual players. In this paper, we propose the concept of the "controllable zone" of a player or a team, representing the area or the set of field positions that the player or the team can occupy before the opponents at time t. A systematic way of computing various forms of controllable zone is presented. Based on the formalism of controllable zone, it is possible to identify whether a team should be in an offensive or a defensive mode, and which strategy among shooting, capturing, dribbling, and passing is desirable for the team at time t. The coordinated motions of individual players are then determined in such a way as to optimize the strategic scores associated with controllable zones. The proposed paradigm is applied to a real environment for animated simulation: 3/spl times/3 FIRA World Cup micro robot soccer match, to evaluate its performance.