[robocup-worldwide] Published -- Three Years of the RoboCup Standard Platform League Drop-In Player Competition

[Katie Genter]

Dear RoboCup community,

For the past four years (2013 - 2016), the RoboCup Standard Platform League
(SPL) has run a drop-in player competition.  This competition served as a
testbed for cooperation without pre-coordination. Specifically, instead of
homogeneous robot teams that are each programmed by the same people and
implicitly pre-coordinated, this competition featured ad hoc teams, i.e.
teams that consist of robots originating from different RoboCup teams and
as such running different software.

The three main organizers of the SPL competition from 2013 to 2015 have
published a journal article about the competition in a Special Issue on
Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination in the Journal of
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems:

Katie Genter, Tim Laue, Peter Stone
*Three Years of the RoboCup Standard Platform League Drop-In Player
Competition: Creating and Maintaining a Large Scale Ad Hoc Teamwork
Robotics Competition*
Unofficial (but complete) version
<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Epstone/Papers/bib2html-links/JAAMAS16-katie.pdf>,
official publisher version
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10458-016-9353-5>

In the article, we provide an overview of this competition, including its
motivation, rules, and how these rules have changed across three iterations
of the competition. We also present and analyze the strategies utilized by
various drop-in players as well as the results of the first three
competitions before suggesting improvements for future competitive
evaluations of ad hoc teamwork. To the best of our knowledge, these
competitions were the largest ad hoc teamwork robotic experiment to date.

We hope that our article will be valuable to those looking to organizer
similar competitions, as well as those designing agents or robots to work
as part of ad hoc teams.  If you have any questions, please feel free to
contact us.

Best regards,
- Katie Genter (and Tim Laue and Peter Stone)
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