Genetic programming of a goalkeeper control strategy for the RoboCup middle size competition

In this paper we describe a genetic programming approach to the design of a motion-control strategy for a goalkeeper robot created to compete in the RoboCup99, the robot soccer world championships which have been held yearly since 1997, as part of the Italian middle size robot team (ART, Azzurra Robot Team). The evolved program sends a motion command to the robot, based on the analysis of information received from a human-coded vision sub-system. The preliminary results obtained on a simulator are encouraging. They suggest that even using very simple fitness functions and training sets including only a small sub-set of the situations that the goalkeeper is required to tackle, it is possible to evolve a complex behavior that permits the goalkeeper to perform well also in more challenging real-world conditions.