We propose a reinforcement learning solution to the soccer dribbling task, a scenario in which a soccer agent has to go from the beginning to the end of a region keeping possession of the ball, as an adversary attempts to gain possession. While the adversary uses a stationary policy, the dribbler learns the best action to take at each decision point. After defining meaningful variables to represent the state space, and high-level macro-actions to incorporate domain knowledge, we describe our application of the reinforcement learning algorithm Sarsa with CMAC for function approximation. Our experiments show that, after the training period, the dribbler is able to accomplish its task against a strong adversary around 58 of the time.
@cite_0: While a lot of papers on RoboCup's robotic 2D soccer simulation have focused on the players' offensive behavior, there are only a few papers that specifically address a team's defense strategy. In this paper, we consider a defense scenario of crucial importance: We focus on situations where one of our players must interfere and disturb an opponent ball leading player in order to scotch the opponent team's attack at an early stage and, even better, to eventually conquer the ball initiating a counter attack. We employ a reinforcement learning methodology that enables our players to autonomously acquire such an aggressive duel behavior, and we have embedded it into our soccer simulation team's defensive strategy. Employing the learned NeuroHassle policy in our competition team, we were able to clearly improve the capabilities of our defense and, thus, to increase the performance of our team as a whole.
Gabel @cite_0 propose a task which is the opposite of the soccer dribbling task, where a defensive player must interfere and disturb the opponent that has possession of the ball. Their solution to that task uses a reinforcement learning algorithm with a multilayer neural network for function approximation.