Coordinating Task Switching in a Robotics Multi-Agent System Using Behavior Trees
About
The application of multi-agent systems in robotics is a very challenging field. Several competitions involving such systems are proposed to foster research and development of strategies and mechanisms using games as the underlying domain. Among them are the ones from the \textit{IEEE Very Small Soccer (VSSS)} category, which is the case study described in this paper. In VSSS, two teams of three robots each compete in a very dynamic environment of a soccer game. Thus, coordination of robots' behavior during the game is crucial to win it. In this paper, we present a Behavior-Tree-based approach to support multi-robot coordination within the VSSS team of the ThundeRatz robotics team from the Universidade de S$\tilde{a}$o Paulo. Moreover, a comparison between the proposed approach and the previous one, which was based on a Finite State Machine (FSM), was conducted using the FIRASim simulator. Besides that, the performance of this new strategy was further evaluated in an academic robotics competition.