New Zealand

Antonio Sgorbissa (December 1st 2006). Multi-Robot Systems and Distributed Intelligence: The ETHNOS Approach to Heterogeneity, Mobile Robotics, Moving Intelligence, Jonas Buchli, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/4733.

Ammar Mohammed, Ulrich Furbach and Frieder Stolzenburg (January 1st 2010). Multi-Robot Systems: Modeling, Specification, and Model Checking, Robot Soccer, Vladan Papi&#263;, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/7349.

Mohamad K. Allouche and Jean Berger (April 1st 2011). The Fusion of Fuzzy Temporal Plans: Managing Uncertainty and Time in Decentralized Command and Control Systems, Multi-Agent Systems - Modeling, Control, Programming, Simulations and Applications, Faisal Alkhateeb, Eslam Al Maghayreh and Iyad Abu Doush, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/15677.

When robots act in an environment, there will be temporal uncertainty over the execution of their actions, i.e. the duration of an action and the time it takes place will be stochastic. The presence of multiple robots in the environment contributes towards this uncertainty.  Temporal uncertainty is often disregarded in multi-robot coordination, and so in this presentation, I will discuss why it is important to model temporal uncertainty, and detail the benefits of doing so. Following this, I will outline my current work modelling temporal uncertainty in terms of congestion in order to generate effective plans for multi-robot navigation tasks. Finally, I will discuss the requirements to achieve general multi-robot coordination under temporal uncertainty.


AAMAS 2020

Towards Multi-Robot Coordination under Temporal Uncertainty (Doctoral Consortium)

temporal uncertainty

multi-robot systems

planning under uncertainty

markov models

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Browse keynotes, discussions, panels and over 300 presentations.


AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

technical paper

This paper presents part of the work developed so far within the scope of my PhD and suggests possible future research directions. My thesis tackles the problem of multi-robot coordination under uncertainty over the long-term. We present a preliminary approach that tackles multi-robot monitoring problems under uncertain task durations. We propose a methodology that takes advantage of a modeling formalism for robot teams: generalized stochastic Petri nets with rewards (GSPNR). A GSPNR allows for unified modeling of action selection and uncertainty on duration of action execution. At the same time, it allows for goal specification through the use of transition rewards and rewards per time unit. The proposed approach exploits the well-defined semantics provided by Markov reward automata in order to synthesize policies.


Long-Run Multi-Robot Planning Under Uncertain Task Durations

Coalition formation games aim at predicting the cooperative behavior of agents when forming alliances. Agents entertain preferences over coalition structures, and the goal is to find a coalition structure that is good for both individual agents and the society as an entity. We measure the quality of partitions in terms of Pareto optimality, individual rationality, and various notions of popularity. We give both efficient algorithms and hardness results for computing partitions that satisfy these properties for additively separable hedonic games and give an outlook to results on other classes of coalition formation games, including roommate games and flatmate games.

Desirable Partitions in Coalition Formation Games

The advent of data marketplaces and the increasing awareness of data privacy call for data privacy pricing mechanisms which can set prices of data properly while assuring privacy preservation. Moreover, the trade-off between the privacy of data and the accuracy of results need to be considered. Additionally, data marketplaces have different structures, including buy-sided market, sell-sided market, two-sided market, and two-sided platform. I will explore data privacy pricing mechanisms under these four structures.


Incentive Mechanisms for Data Privacy Preservation and Pricing

In Boolean games, each agent controls a set of Boolean variables and has a
goal represented by a propositional formula. We initiate a study of inference in Boolean games assuming the presence of a principle who has the
ability to control the agents and impose taxation schemes. Previous work used taxation schemes to guide a game towards certain equilibria. We show how taxation schemes can also be used to infer agents' goals. In our formulation, agents' goals are assumed to be unknown and the objective of the principle is to infer the goals of all the agents using appropriate taxation queries. Using an undirected graph (called the goal
overlap graph) associated with a Boolean game, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium for any
taxation query. Using these conditions, we develop an algorithm that uses taxation queries to learn agents' goals. Using a valid node coloring of the goal overlap graph, we show that goals of many agents can be inferred simultaneously. We also present more efficient (in terms of number of queries) goal inference algorithms for two special classes of Boolean functions, namely threshold and symmetric functions. 


Boolean Games: Inferring Agents' Goals Using Taxation Queries

We introduce ballooning multi-armed bandits (BL-MAB), a novel extension to the classical stochastic MAB model. In the BL-MAB model, the set of available arms grows (or balloons) over time. The regret in a BL-MAB setting is computed with respect to the best available arm at each time. We first observe that the existing stochastic MAB algorithms are not regret-optimal for the BL-MAB model. We show that if the best arm is equally likely to arrive at any time, a sub-linear regret cannot be achieved, irrespective of the arrival of the other arms. We further show that if the best arm is more likely to arrive in the early rounds, one can achieve sub-linear regret. Making reasonable assumptions on the arrival distribution of the best arm in terms of the thinness of the distribution’s tail, we prove that the proposed algorithm achieves sub-linear instance-independent regret. We further quantify explicit dependence of regret on the arrival distribution parameters.


Ballooning Multi Armed Bandits

"Chore division is a class of fair division problems in which some undesirable “resource” must be shared among a set of participants, with each participant wanting to get as little as possible. Typically the set of participants is fixed and known at the outset. This paper introduces a novel variant, called sequential online chore division (SOCD), in which participants arrive and depart online, while the chore is being performed: both the total number of participants and their arrival/departure times are initially unknown. In SOCD, exactly one agent must be performing the chore at any give time (e.g. keeping lookout), and switching the performer incurs a cost. In this paper, we propose and analyze
three mechanisms for SOCD: one centralized mechanism using side payments, and two distributed ones that seek to balance the participants’ loads. Analysis and results are presented in a domain motivated by autonomous vehicle convoy formation, where the chore is leading the convoy so that all followers can enjoy reduced wind resistance."


Sequential Online Chore Division for Autonomous Vehicle Convoy Formation

Voting for ensemble classifiers

Implementation of the Multi-Agent Microservices concept using the CArtAgO framework to represent virtual resources exposed by the agent, with a Linked Data represenation of each resource.


Delivering Multi-Agent MicroServices using CArtAgO

This work presents an extension to a graph-based evolutionary algorithm, called Genetic Network Programming with Reinforcement Learning (GNP-RL) to make it more amenable for solving coordinated multi-agent path-planning tasks in dynamic environments. We improve the algorithm’s ability to evolve meta-level reasoning strategies in three aspects: genetic composition, search and learning strategies, using optimal search algorithm, constraint conformance and task prioritization techniques.


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Long-Run Multi-Robot Planning Under Uncertain Task Durations

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Next from AAMAS 2020

Long-Run Multi-Robot Planning Under Uncertain Task Durations

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Multi-Robot Planning Under Uncertainty with Congestion-Aware Models

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