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Modeling interaction strategies using POS: An application to soccer robots

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Abstract

As seen earlier POS is a general agent conversation protocol engineering formalism that has proved efficient when used in communities of software information agents. The aim of this paper is to show how much POS is simple, easy to use, and very appropriate for implementing interaction protocols in a collaborative agent setting. In order to exemplify our approach we focus on an application domain with real time constraints such as soccer robots and show how an inherently symbolic abstract system like POS can be neatly integrated with agents whose internal architecture is reactive and relies on bottom-up behavior-based techniques.

First, we shortly discuss aspects of heterogeneity with respect to soccer robots and present the RoboCup experimental setting. Then we sketch the difficulties that arise when trying to coordinate an heterogeneous team with conventional methods. In response, we introduce some elements of the POS (Protocol Operational Semantics) model. The following sections examine several basic behaviors of the JavaSoccer simulation environment as it is later used along with TeamBots to highlight POS’ capabilities, demonstrate how POS is a suited theoretical tool and leads to extremely compact and modular code due to its high expressive power, and discuss the obtained results. Finally we conclude the article with a comparison to related works as well as some perspectives about the engineering of interaction protocols.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grenoble National Institute of Technology (INP Grenoble), 50 rue Laffemas, BP 54, 26902, Valence cedex 9, France

    Jean-Luc Koning

  2. Sony CSL Paris, 6 rue Amyot, 75005, Paris, France

    Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

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  1. Jean-Luc Koning
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  2. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
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Correspondence to Jean-Luc Koning.

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Koning, JL., Oudeyer, PY. Modeling interaction strategies using POS: An application to soccer robots. Appl Intell 25, 7–21 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-006-8863-2

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