The ability to create artificial intelligence (AI) capable of performing complex tasks is rapidly outpacing our ability to ensure the safe and assured operation of AI-enabled systems. Fortunately, a landscape of AI safety research is emerging in response to this asymmetry and yet there is a long way to go. In particular, recent simulation environments created to illustrate AI safety risks are relatively simple or narrowly-focused on a particular issue. Hence, we see a critical need for AI safety research environments that abstract essential aspects of complex real-world applications. In this work, we introduce the AI safety TanksWorld as an environment for AI safety research with three essential aspects: competing performance objectives, human-machine teaming, and multi-agent competition. The AI safety TanksWorld aims to accelerate the advancement of safe multi-agent decision-making algorithms by providing a software framework to support competitions with both system performance and safety objectives. As a work in progress, this paper introduces our research objectives and learning environment with reference code and baseline performance metrics to follow in a future work.
@article{arxiv.2002.11174,
title = {TanksWorld: A Multi-Agent Environment for AI Safety Research},
author = {Corban G. Rivera and Olivia Lyons and Arielle Summitt and Ayman Fatima and Ji Pak and William Shao and Robert Chalmers and Aryeh Englander and Edward W. Staley and I-Jeng Wang and Ashley J. Llorens},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.11174},
year = {2020}
}