Overtaking opponents with blocking strategies using fuzzy logic

In car racing, blocking refers to maneuvers that can prevent, disturb or possibly block an overtaking action by an incoming car. In this paper, we present an advanced overtaking behavior that is able to deal with opponents implementing advanced blocking strategies. The behavior we developed has been integrated in an existing fuzzy-based architecture for driving simulated cars and tested using The Open Car Racing Simulator (TORCS). We compared a driver implementing our overtaking strategy against six of the bots available in the TORCS distribution and simplix, a state-of-the-art bot which won the 2009 TORCS Endurance World Championship. The comparison was carried out against opponents implementing three blocking strategies of increasing difficulty. The results we present show that our strategy can overtake the opponent car in all the considered scenarios. In contrast, all the other bots can complete the overtaking maneuvers in only less than 40% of the cases. Our strategy is slightly more risky than others and may result in limited rear and lateral damage. Other more cautious drivers receive almost no damage, however they can overtake only around 30% of the cases.