The RoboCup 2013 drop-in player challenges: a testbed for ad hoc teamwork

As the prevalence of autonomous agents grows, so does the number of interactions between these agents. Therefore, it is desirable for these agents to be capable of collaborating without pre-coordination. While past research on ad hoc teamwork has focused mainly on relatively simple domains, the long-term vision has been to enable robots and other autonomous agents to exhibit the sort of flexibility and adaptability on complex tasks that people do. This research introduces a series of pick-up robot soccer experiments that were carried out in three different leagues at the international RoboCup competition in 2013. In all cases, agents from different labs were put on teams with no pre-coordination. This abstract summarizes the structure of these experiments and analyzes the results. The work describes a new large-scale ad hoc teamwork testbed that can serve as a starting point for future experimental ad hoc teamwork research.