Experiences acquired in the design of RoboCup teams: A comparison of two fielded teams

Increasingly, multi-agent systems are being designed for a variety of compl ex, dynamic domains. Effective agent interactions in such domains raise som e of the most fundamental research challenges for agent-based systems, in t eamwork, multi-agent learning and agent modelling. The RoboCup research ini tiative, particularly the simulation league, has been proposed to pursue su ch multi-agent research challenges, using the common testbed of simulation soccer. Despite the significant popularity of RoboCup within the research c ommunity, general lessons have not often been extracted from participation in RoboCup. This is what we attempt to do here. We have fielded two teams, ISIS97 and ISIS98, in RoboCup competitions. These teams have been in the to p four teams in these competitions. We compare the teams, and attempt to an alyze and generalize the lessons learned. This analysis reveals several sur prises, pointing out lessons for teamwork and for multi-agent learning.