oliver.obst.eu

I was excited to find one of my approaches being used in a commercial product for emergency egress simulation, sold by a company in the US: Back in 2006, Heni, Jan and I published an approach we called Inverse Steering Behaviors in the chapter “Fast, Neat, and Under Control: Arbitrating Between Steering Behaviors” of AI Game Programming Wisdom 3. The technique builds on Steering Behaviors by Craig Reynolds – reactive procedures for physical agents (like robots or simulated creatures) to move in a lifelike way within dynamic environments. Developed in the late 80s, steering behaviors found applications for example in movies like Lord of the Rings. Our Inverse Steering Behaviors improve the arbitration between individual behaviors, which results in less collisions. Back when we did the work, we used the approach in our robotic soccer team for navigation and to dribble around opponents. The agent-based emergency evacuation simulation system sold by  Thunderhead Engineering, is called Pathfinder.
(more…)

Finally, the book Computers in Sport (edited by P. Dabnicki and A. Baca) appeared. In this book, my colleagues and I have a chapter “Approaching a Formal Soccer Theory from the Behavior Specification in Robotic Soccer“, where we discuss a top-down approach to modelling soccer knowledge, as it can be found in soccer theory books. The goal is to model soccer strategies and tactics in a way that they are usable for multiple robotic soccer leagues in the RoboCup. We investigate if and how soccer theory can be formalized such that specification and execution are possible. The advantage is clear: theory abstracts from hardware and from specific situations in different leagues. We introduce basic primitives compliant with the terminology known in soccer theory, discuss an example on an abstract level and formalize it. The formalization of soccer presented here is appealing. It goes beyond the behaviour specification of soccer playing robots. For sports science a unified formal soccer theory might help to better understand and to formulate basic concepts in soccer. The possibility of the formalization to develop computer programs, which allow to simulate and to reason about soccer moves, might also take sports science a step further.
Get your copy of the book at your local book shop or at Amazon .

Technorati Tags: book, sport, computers, robocup, robots, theory