Abstract

Decision making is an important issue in robot soccer, which has not been investigated deeply enough by the RoboCup research community. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach to decision making. The proposed methodology is based on the maximization of a game situation score function, which generalizes the concept of accomplishing different game objectives as: passing, scoring a goal, clearing the ball, etc. The methodology includes a quantitative method for evaluating the game situation score. Experimental results in a high-level strategy simulator, which runs our four-legged code in simulated AIBOs' robots, show a noticeable improvement in the scoring effectiveness achieved by a team that uses the proposed approach for making decisions. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.