ConTaCT: Deciding to Communicate during Time-Critical Collaborative Tasks in Unknown, Deterministic Domains
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preprint_AAAI16_Communication_unhelkar.pdf
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318.55 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Unhelkar, Vaibhav Vasant
Shah, Julie A.
Date Issued
February 2016
Journal
Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2016)
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Citation
Unhelkar, Vaibhav V., and Julie A. Shah. "ConTaCT: Deciding to Communicate during Time-Critical Collaborative Tasks in Unknown, Deterministic Domains." Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2016) (February 2016).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Communication between agents has the potential to improve team performance of collaborative tasks. However, communication is not free in most domains, requiring agents to reason about the costs and benefits of sharing information. In this work, we develop an online, decentralized communication policy, ConTaCT, that enables agents to decide whether or not to communicate during time-critical collaborative tasks in unknown, deterministic environments. Our approach is motivated by real-world applications, including the coordination of disaster response and search and rescue teams. These settings motivate a model structure that explicitly represents the world model as initially unknown but deterministic in nature, and that de-emphasizes uncertainty about action outcomes. Simulated experiments are conducted in which ConTaCT is compared to other multi-agent communication policies, and results indicate that ConTaCT achieves comparable task performance while substantially reducing communication overhead.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2016/aaai16accepted-papers.pdf
