Inside the brain of an elite athlete: The neural processes that support high achievement in sports

Events like the World Championships in athletics and the Olympic Games raise the public profile of competitive sports. They may also leave us wondering what sets the competitors in these events apart from those of us who simply watch. Here we attempt to link neural and cognitive processes that have been found to be important for elite performance with computational and physiological theories inspired by much simpler laboratory tasks. In this way we hope to inspire neuroscientists to consider how their basic research might help to explain sporting skill at the highest levels of performance

Roboskeleton: an architecture for coordinating Robot Soccer agents

SkeletonAgent is an agent framework whose main feature is to integrate different artificial intelligent skills, like planning or learning, to obtain new behaviours in a multi-agent environment. This framework has been previously instantiated in a deliberative domain (electronic tourism), where planning was used to integrate Web information in a tourist plan. RoboSkeleton results from the instantiation of the same framework, SkeletonAgent, in a very different domain, the robot soccer. This paper shows how this architecture is used to obtain collaborative behaviours in a reactive domain. The paper describes how the different modules of the architecture for the robot soccer agents are designed, directly showing the flexibility of our framework.Publicad

Predicting opponent actions by bbservation

In competitive domains, the knowledge about the opponent can give players a clear advantage. This idea lead us in the past to propose an approach to acquire models of opponents, based only on the observation of their input-output behavior. If opponent outputs could be accessed directly, a model can be constructed by feeding a machine learning method with traces of the opponent. However, that is not the case in the Robocup domain. To overcome this problem, in this paper we present a three phases approach to model low-level behavior of individual opponent agents. First, we build a classifier to label opponent actions based on observation. Second, our agent observes an opponent and labels its actions using the previous classifier. From these observations, a model is constructed to predict the opponent actions. Finally, the agent uses the model to anticipate opponent reactions. In this paper, we have presented a proof-of-principle of our approach, termed OMBO (Opponent Modeling Based on Observation), so that a striker agent can anticipate a goalie. Results show that scores are significantly higher using the acquired opponentrsquos model of actions.Publicad

Multi-robot coordination using flexible setplays : applications in RoboCup's simulation and middle-size leagues

Tese de Doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Exploiting opponent behavior in multi-agent systems

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Coordination methodologies applied to RoboCup : a graphical definition of setplays

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200