Reinforcement Learning Within the Classical Robotics Stack: A Case Study in Robot Soccer

Adam Labiosa, Zhihan Wang, Siddhant Agarwal, William Cong, Geethika Hemkumar, Abhinav Narayan Harish, Benjamin Hong, Josh Kelle, Chen Li, Yuhao Li, Zisen Shao, Peter Stone, Josiah P. Hanna

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-agent systems, Robotics

TL;DR: We present and analyze our reinforcement learning-based system that competed and won the 2024 RoboCup Challenge Shield.

Abstract: Robot decision-making in partially observable, real-time, dynamic, and multi-agent environments remains a difficult and unsolved challenge. Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to learning decision-making in such domains, however, end-to-end RL in complex environments is often intractable. To address this challenge in the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL) domain, we developed a novel architecture integrating RL within a classical robotics stack, while employing a multi-fidelity sim2real approach and decomposing behavior into learned sub-behaviors with heuristic selection. Our architecture led to victory in the 2024 RoboCup SPL Challenge Shield Division. In this work, we fully describe our system's architecture and empirically analyze key design decisions that contributed to its success. Our approach demonstrates how RL-based behaviors can be integrated into complete robot behavior architectures.

Submission Number: 9