The RoboCup 2014 SPL Drop-In Player Competition: Encouraging Teamwork without Pre-Coordination

The Standard Platform League is a soccer league at the annual RoboCup world championships in which teams of five humanoid robots play against each other. In 2014, the Dropin Player Competition was added to the league to serve as a testbed for cooperation without pre-coordination. Instead of homogeneous robot teams that are programmed by each team to implicitly work together, this competition features ad hoc teams, i. e. teams that consist of robots originating from different RoboCup teams and that are each running different software. In this extended abstract, we provide an overview of this competition, including its motivation and rules.