In an adversarial multi-robot task, such as playing robot soccer, decisions for team and single robot behavior must be made quickly to take advantage of short-term opportunities when they occur. When no such opportunities exist, the team must execute sequences of coordinated action across team members that increase the likelihood of future opportunities. A hierarchical architecture, called STP, was developed by Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Group, and more specifically Veloso, to control an autonomous team of robots operating in an adversarial environment.

STP consists of Skills for executing the low-level actions that make up robot behavior, Tactics for determining what skills to execute, and Plays for coordinating synchronized activity amongst team members.

In our system, skills and tactics are script files, and plays are generated by either script files or the visual Strategy Maker software.