The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

This chapter discusses the problem of agent aiding of ad hoc, decentralized human teams so as to improve team performance on time-stressed group tasks. To see how human teams rise to the challenge, we analyze the communication patterns of teams performing a collaborative search task that recreates some of the cognitive difficulties faced by teams during search and rescue operations. Our experiments show that the communication patterns of successful decentralized ad hoc teams performing a version of the task that requires tight coordination differ both from the teams that are less successful at task completion and from teams performing a loosely coupled version of the same task. We conclude by discussing: (1) what lessons can be derived, from observing humans, to facilitate the development of agents to support ad hoc, decentralized teams, and (2) where can intelligent agents be inserted into human teams to improve the humans' performance.

Keywords

ad-hoc decentralized human-agent teams, agent members of human teams

Notes

Sponsor: U.S. Army Research Labs

Grant ID: Hershey, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Advanced Agent - Robotics Technology Lab

Associated Project(s): IBM ITA: Human-Agent Teamwork Models

Number of pages: 29

Text Reference

Gita Sukthankar, Katia Sycara, Joseph Andrew Giampapa, and Christopher Burnett, "Communications for Agent-based Human Team Support," chapter in Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, Virginia Dignum, ed., IGI-Global (http://www.igi-pub.com/) Handbook of Research, Information Science Reference, 2009, pp. 285-313.

BibTeX Reference

@incollection{Sukthankar_2009_6135,
   author = "Gita Sukthankar and Katia Sycara and Joseph Andrew Giampapa and Christopher Burnett",
   editor = "Virginia Dignum",
   title = "Communications for Agent-based Human Team Support",
   booktitle = "chapter in Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems",
   pages = "285-313",
   publisher = "IGI-Global (http://www.igi-pub.com/) Handbook of Research, Information Science Reference",
   address = "Hershey, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.",
   month = "March",
   year = "2009",
}

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