Centralized Robot Soccer Architecture Based on Roles

Robot soccer offers an adequate domain in order to design and validate architectures for robot-coordination. One classification refers to centralized architectures, which correspond to robot soccer environments with global perception and centralized control of the robots, using only one decision-making system. In this paper it is presented a centralized robot soccer architecture based on roles, where one role is assigned to each player in order to select a specific behaviour depending on game conditions. Roles are assigned using an assignment function, which is activated when the ball changes of the quadrant in the playing field. This strategy has been compared by simulation in games against an opposition team with constant roles, and other team with a hierarchical strategy which assigns roles depending on a tactic previously selected. The results showed a better performance in the team with the role-based strategy outperformed the rest of the methods. As well as uniformity within the players' behaviors during the role and behavior transitions.