Abstract

1 RoboCup simulated soccer presents many challenges to reinforcement learning methods, in-cluding a large state space, hidden and uncertain state, multiple independent agents learning simultaneously, and long and variable delays in the effects of actions. We describe our appli-cation of episodic SMDP Sarsa(λ) with linear tile-coding function approximation and variable λ to learning higher-level decisions in a keepaway subtask of RoboCup soccer. In keepaway, one team, “the keepers, ” tries to keep control of the ball for as long as possible despite the efforts of “the takers. ” The keepers learn individually when to hold the ball and when to pass to a teammate. Our agents learned policies that significantly outperform a range of benchmark policies. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by applying it to a number of task variations including different field sizes and different numbers of players on each team.

Citations