The Standard Platform League is one of the main competitions at the annual RoboCup world championships. In this competition, teams of five humanoid robots play soccer against each other. In 2013, the league began a new competition which serves as a testbed for cooperation without pre-coordination: the Drop-in Player Competition. Instead of homogeneous robot teams that are each programmed by the same people and hence implicitly pre-coordinated, this competition features ad hoc teams, i.e. teams that consist of robots originating from different RoboCup teams and as such running different software. In this article, we provide an overview of this competition, including its motivation, rules, and how these rules have changed across three iterations of the competition. We then present and analyze the strategies utilized by various drop-in players as well as the results of the first three competitions before suggesting improvements for future competitive evaluations of ad hoc teamwork. To the best of our knowledge, these three competitions are the largest annual ad hoc teamwork robotic experiment to date. Across three years, the competition has seen 56 entries from 30 different organizations and consisted of 510 min of game time that resulted in approximately 85 robot hours.

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Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS) (2016), pp. 1--31. Springer.

@article{JAAMAS16-katie, title={Three Years of the RoboCup Standard Platform League Drop-in Player Competition: Creating and Maintaining a Large Scale Ad Hoc Teamwork Robotics Competition}, author={Katie Genter and Tim Laue and Peter Stone}, journal={Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS)}, publisher={Springer}, pages={1--31}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?genter:jaamas16", year={2016} }