PaSo-Team 2000

Following the experience done in previous competitions, it has been developed the 2000 version of PaSo-Team (The University of PAdua Simulated Robot SOccer Team), a reviewed release of Paso-Team99. During the RoboCup ’99 competition in Stockholm some teams suffered syncronization problems with the soccer server: these problems greatly influenced their performances and prevented them from playing successfully. While developing PaSo-Team 2000 the main efforts were dedicated to better understanding timing and syncronization techniques for real-time multi-agent systems. Following the interesting experience done by Kostiadis in developing the Essex Wizzard team [1] we redesigned the syncronization procedures using the multi-threading paradigm. Solving syncronization in a multi-threading environment gives important theoretical hints to approch the coordination for those multi-agent systems made by thousand of very simple concurrent interacting modules. During the Stockholm competition PaSo-Team99 suffered another major problem regarding the actions a player must take when the game is stopped (i.e. when the ball is outside or when a team is offside). For example if a player has to throw-in the ball, he must go outside the field, turn toward the field and eventually kick the ball, performing different actions even if the state of the game doesn’t change. As in a reactive architecture the current behaviour can change only when the game state changes, PaSo-Team99 introduced virtual states to ensure a change of behaviour. Instead in PaSo-Team 2000 we simplify the design of these actions introducing multi-step behaviours.