Performance of communicating cognitive agents in cooperative robot teams

Changyun Wei*, Koen V. Hindriks, Catholijn M. Jonker

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of communication strategies in the coordination of cooperative robot teams. Robots are required to perform search and retrieval tasks, in which they need to search targets of interest in the environment and deliver them back to a home base. To study communication strategies in robot teams, we first discuss a case without communication, which is considered as the baseline, and also analyse various kinds of coordination strategies for robots to explore and deliver the targets in such a setting. We proceed to analyse three communication cases, where the robots can exchange their beliefs and/or goals with one another. Using communicated information, the robots can develop more complicated protocols to coordinate their activities. We use the Blocks World for Teams (BW4T) as the simulator to carry out experiments, and robots in the BW4T are controlled by cognitive agents. The team goal of the robots is to search and retrieve a sequence of colored blocks from the environment. In terms of cooperative teamwork, we have studied two main variations: a variant where all blocks to be retrieved have the same color (no ordering constraints on the team goal) and a variant where blocks of various colors need to be retrieved in a particular order (with ordering constraints). The experimental results show that communication will be particularly helpful to enhance the team performance for the second variant, and exchanging more information does not always yield a better team performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAgents and Artificial Intelligence - 6th International Conference, ICAART 2014, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsJaap van den Herik, Joaquim Filipe, Jaap van den Herik, Béatrice Duval, Stephane Loiseau, Joaquim Filipe, Béatrice Duval, Stephane Loiseau
PublisherSpringer/Verlag
Pages13-31
Number of pages19
ISBN (Print)9783319252094, 9783319252094
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2014 - Angers, France
Duration: 6 Mar 20148 Mar 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8946
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2014
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityAngers
Period6/03/148/03/14

Keywords

  • Communication
  • Foraging
  • Multi-robot coordination

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