Designing Offensive Robot Soccer Strategies from Principles in Invasion Team Sports

Abstract RoboCup soccer robots seldom use offline defined strategies to proactively coordinate their passing and movement actions in a soccer game. Human team sports do that abundantly, especially in Invasion Team Sports (ITS). This manuscript uses literature on ITS strategy, with a focus on futsal because of its similarity to RoboCup soccer, to analyze the tactical principles – imagined as abstract guidelines, e.g., “to threaten defensive lines” – behind their coordination patterns. Our main contribution is in the structured design of robot soccer strategies via an explicit composition of human-inspired tactical principles. Our approach provides robot soccer strategists with clearer insight in applying best practices of human strategy design, serving as a practical starting point for designing and adjusting robot soccer strategies; this is currently missing in robot soccer literature, as it does not delve deeper into why the coordination patterns exist. Our contribution is realized by performing the following steps: 1) the proposition of an initial guideline to apply a composition of tactical principles in the design of robot soccer strategies, 2) the formalization of tactical principles into robot action and perception constraints, and 3) the design of a 5-on-5 robot soccer strategy with the insights from the previous two steps. The strategy is implemented in the Skill, Tactics, and Plays (STP) software as used by the Tech United Eindhoven soccer robots. The experimental results validate the applicability of our designed strategy. The first validation, in the form of a sensitivity analysis, is performed on the Tech United Eindhoven simulator, and the second is realized in a real game against Robotsports.