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Main Authors: Su, Zhi, Gao, Yuman, Lukas, Emily, Li, Yunfei, Cai, Jiaze, Tulbah, Faris, Gao, Fei, Yu, Chao, Li, Zhongyu, Wu, Yi, Sreenath, Koushil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13834
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author Su, Zhi
Gao, Yuman
Lukas, Emily
Li, Yunfei
Cai, Jiaze
Tulbah, Faris
Gao, Fei
Yu, Chao
Li, Zhongyu
Wu, Yi
Sreenath, Koushil
author_facet Su, Zhi
Gao, Yuman
Lukas, Emily
Li, Yunfei
Cai, Jiaze
Tulbah, Faris
Gao, Fei
Yu, Chao
Li, Zhongyu
Wu, Yi
Sreenath, Koushil
contents Achieving coordinated teamwork among legged robots requires both fine-grained locomotion control and long-horizon strategic decision-making. Robot soccer offers a compelling testbed for this challenge, combining dynamic, competitive, and multi-agent interactions. In this work, we present a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that enables fully autonomous and decentralized quadruped robot soccer. First, a set of highly dynamic low-level skills is trained for legged locomotion and ball manipulation, such as walking, dribbling, and kicking. On top of these, a high-level strategic planning policy is trained with Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) via Fictitious Self-Play (FSP). This learning framework allows agents to adapt to diverse opponent strategies and gives rise to sophisticated team behaviors, including coordinated passing, interception, and dynamic role allocation. With an extensive ablation study, the proposed learning method shows significant advantages in the cooperative and competitive multi-agent soccer game. We deploy the learned policies to real quadruped robots relying solely on onboard proprioception and decentralized localization, with the resulting system supporting autonomous robot-robot and robot-human soccer matches on indoor and outdoor soccer courts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13834
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Real-World Cooperative and Competitive Soccer with Quadrupedal Robot Teams
Su, Zhi
Gao, Yuman
Lukas, Emily
Li, Yunfei
Cai, Jiaze
Tulbah, Faris
Gao, Fei
Yu, Chao
Li, Zhongyu
Wu, Yi
Sreenath, Koushil
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Achieving coordinated teamwork among legged robots requires both fine-grained locomotion control and long-horizon strategic decision-making. Robot soccer offers a compelling testbed for this challenge, combining dynamic, competitive, and multi-agent interactions. In this work, we present a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that enables fully autonomous and decentralized quadruped robot soccer. First, a set of highly dynamic low-level skills is trained for legged locomotion and ball manipulation, such as walking, dribbling, and kicking. On top of these, a high-level strategic planning policy is trained with Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) via Fictitious Self-Play (FSP). This learning framework allows agents to adapt to diverse opponent strategies and gives rise to sophisticated team behaviors, including coordinated passing, interception, and dynamic role allocation. With an extensive ablation study, the proposed learning method shows significant advantages in the cooperative and competitive multi-agent soccer game. We deploy the learned policies to real quadruped robots relying solely on onboard proprioception and decentralized localization, with the resulting system supporting autonomous robot-robot and robot-human soccer matches on indoor and outdoor soccer courts.
title Toward Real-World Cooperative and Competitive Soccer with Quadrupedal Robot Teams
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13834