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We explore the probabilistic foundations of shared control in complex dynamic environments. In order to do this, we formulate shared control as a random process and describe the joint distribution that governs its behavior. For…
Problems of cooperation--in which agents seek ways to jointly improve their welfare--are ubiquitous and important. They can be found at scales ranging from our daily routines--such as driving on highways, scheduling meetings, and working…
Many challenges remain before AI agents can be deployed in real-world environments. However, one virtue of such environments is that they are inherently multi-agent and contain human experts. Using advanced social intelligence in such an…
With the increasing ubiquity of technology in our daily lives, the complexity of our environment and the mechanisms required to function have also increased exponentially. Failure of any of the mechanical and digital devices that we rely on…
In this paper, we solve the local gathering problem of a swarm of $n$ indistinguishable, point-shaped robots on a two dimensional grid in asymptotically optimal time $\mathcal{O}(n)$ in the fully synchronous $\mathcal{FSYNC}$ time model.…
We consider the problem of completely covering an unknown discrete environment with a swarm of asynchronous, frequently-crashing autonomous mobile robots. We represent the environment by a discrete graph, and task the robots with occupying…
Global coordination is required to solve a wide variety of challenging collective action problems from network colorings to the tragedy of the commons. Recent empirical study shows that the presence of a few noisy autonomous agents can…
This paper deals with the classical problem of exploring a ring by a cohort of synchronous robots. We focus on the perpetual version of this problem in which it is required that each node of the ring is visited by a robot infinitely often.…
The hunter and gatherer approach copes with the problem of dynamic multi-robot task allocation, where tasks are unknowingly distributed over an environment. This approach employs two complementary teams of agents: one agile in exploring…
Many robotic applications, such as sanding, polishing, wiping and sensor scanning, require a manipulator to dexterously cover a surface using its end-effector. In this paper, we provide an efficient and effective coverage path planning…
Artificially intelligent agents deployed in the real-world will require the ability to reliably \textit{cooperate} with humans (as well as other, heterogeneous AI agents). To provide formal guarantees of successful cooperation, we must make…
This paper addresses the problem of collaboratively satisfying long-term spatial constraints in multi-agent systems. Each agent is subject to spatial constraints, expressed as inequalities, which may depend on the positions of other agents…
Navigation in cluttered underwater environments is challenging, especially when there are constraints on communication and self-localisation. Part of the fully distributed underwater navigation problem has been resolved by introducing…
The problem of coordination without a priori information about the environment is important in robotics. Applications vary from formation control to search and rescue. This paper considers the problem of search by a group of solitary…
This paper presents coordination algorithms for groups of mobile agents performing deployment and coverage tasks. As an important modeling constraint, we assume that each mobile agent has a limited sensing/communication radius. Based on the…
Random pairwise encounters often occur in large populations, or groups of mobile agents, and various types of local interactions that happen at encounters account for emergent global phenomena. In particular, in the fields of swarm…
This paper considers deployment problems where a mobile robotic network must optimize its configuration in a distributed way in order to minimize a steady-state cost function that depends on the spatial distribution of certain probabilistic…
Motivated by the increasing appeal of robots in information-gathering missions, we study multi-agent path planning problems in which the agents must remain interconnected. We model an area by a topological graph specifying the movement and…
Continuous surveillance of a spatial region using distributed robots and sensors is a well-studied application in the area of multi-agent systems. This paper investigates a practically-relevant scenario where robotic sensors are introduced…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…