Title
Towards flexible coordination of human-agent teams
Abstract
Enabling interactions of agent-teams and humans is a critical area of research, with encouraging progress in the past few years. However, previous work suffers from three key limitations: (i) limited human situational awareness, reducing human effectiveness in directing agent teams, (ii) the agent team's rigid interaction strategies that limit team performance, and (iii) lack of formal tools to analyze the impact of such interaction strategies. This article presents a software prototype called DEFACTO (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence). DEFACTO is based on a software proxy architecture and 3D visualization system, which addresses the three limitations mentioned above. First, the 3D visualization interface enables human virtual omnipresence in the environment, improving human situational awareness and ability to assist agents. Second, generalizing past work on adjustable autonomy, the agent team chooses among a variety of team-level interaction strategies, even excluding humans from the loop in extreme circumstances. Third, analysis tools help predict the performance of (and choose among) different interaction strategies. DEFACTO is illustrated in a future disaster response simulation scenario, and extensive experimental results are presented.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.3233/MGS-2005-1102
Multiagent and Grid Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
rigid interaction strategy,adjustable autonomy,team-level interaction strategy,multiagent systems,human-agent team,enabling interaction,different interaction strategy,human virtual omnipresence,towards flexible coordination,agent team,limited human situational awareness,teamwork,human effectiveness,interaction strategy,human situational awareness,homeland security,3d visualization,situation awareness
Analysis tools,Teamwork,Architecture,Computer science,Visualization,Situation awareness,Autonomy,Knowledge management,Multi-agent system,Software,Human–computer interaction,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
1
1
1574-1702
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.43
14
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nathan Schurr118816.28
Janusz Marecki268549.06
Milind Tambe36008522.25
Paul Scerri482272.05