Planning the path with Reinforcement Learning: Optimal Robot Motion Planning in RoboCup Small Size League Environments

This work investigates the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to tackle robot motion planning challenges in the dynamic RoboCup Small Size League (SSL). Using a heuristic control approach, we evaluate RL's effectiveness in obstacle-free and single-obstacle path-planning environments. Ablation studies reveal significant performance improvements. Our method achieved a 60% time gain in obstacle-free environments compared to baseline algorithms. Additionally, our findings demonstrated dynamic obstacle avoidance capabilities, adeptly navigating around moving blocks. These findings highlight the potential of RL to enhance robot motion planning in the challenging and unpredictable SSL environment.

An analysis of Reinforcement Learning applied to Coach task in IEEE Very Small Size Soccer

The IEEE Very Small Size Soccer (VSSS) is a robot soccer competition in which two teams of three small robots play against each other. Traditionally, a deterministic coach agent will choose the most suitable strategy and formation for each adversary's strategy. Therefore, the role of a coach is of great importance to the game. In this sense, this paper proposes an end-to-end approach for the coaching task based on Reinforcement Learning (RL). The proposed system processes the information during the simulated matches to learn an optimal policy that chooses the current formation, depending on the opponent and game conditions. We trained two RL policies against three different teams (balanced, offensive, and heavily offensive) in a simulated environment. Our results were assessed against one of the top teams of the VSSS league, showing promising results after achieving a win/loss ratio of approximately 2.0.