The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Multi-agent domains consisting of teams of agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment offer challenging research opportunities. In this paper, we introduce periodic team synchronization domains, as time-critical environments in which agents act autonomously with limited communication, but they can periodically synchronize in a full-communication setting. We present a team agent structure that allows for an agent to capture and reason about team agreements. We achieve collaboration between agents through the introduction of formations. A formation decomposes the task space defining a set of roles. Homogeneous agents can flexibly switch roles within formations, and agents can change formations dynamically, according to pre-defined triggers to be evaluated at run-time. This flexibility increases the performance of the overall team. Our team structure further includes pre-planning for frequent situations. We fully implemented this approach in the domain of robotic soccer. Our simulator team made it to the semi-finals of the RoboCup-97 competition, in which 29 teams participated. It achieved a total score of 67-9 over six different games, and successfully demonstrated its flexible team structure. Using the same team structure, our small robot team won the RoboCup-97 small-robot competition, in which 4 teams participated. It achieved a total score of 13-1 over 4 games and also demonstrated its flexible team structure.

Notes

Text Reference

Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso, "Task Decomposition and Dynamic Role Assignment for Real-Time Strategic Teamwork," Intelligent Agents V - Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL'98), 1999.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Veloso_1999_3174,
   author = "Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso",
   editor = "Mueller, Singh, and Rao",
   title = "Task Decomposition and Dynamic Role Assignment for Real-Time Strategic Teamwork",
   booktitle = "Intelligent Agents V - Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL'98)",
   publisher = "Springer Verlag",
   address = "Heidelberg",
   year = "1999",
}

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