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