Due to its decentralised, distributed and scalable nature, swarm robotics has great potential for applications ranging from agriculture to environmental monitoring and logistics. Various swarm control methods and algorithms are currently known, such as virtual leader, vector and potential field, and others. Such methods often show good results in specific conditions and tasks. The variety of tasks solved by the swarm requires the development of a universal control algorithm. In this paper, we propose an evolution of a thermal motion equivalent method (TMEM) inspired by the behavioural similarity of thermodynamic interactions between molecules. Previous research has shown the high efficiency of such a method for terrain monitoring tasks. This work addresses the problem of swarm formation of geometric structures, as required for logistics and formation movement tasks. It is shown that the formation of swarm geometric structures using the TMEM is possible with a special nonlinear interaction function of the agents. A piecewise linear interaction function is proposed that allows the formation of a stable group of agents. The results of the paper are validated by numerical modelling of the swarm dynamics. A linear quadrocopter model is considered as an agent. The fairness of the choice of the interaction function is shown.

Deceptive agents are a challenge for the safety, trustworthiness, and cooperation of AI systems. We focus on the problem that agents might deceive in order to achieve their goals (for instance, in our experiments with language models, the goal of being evaluated as truthful). There are a number of existing definitions of deception in the literature on game theory and symbolic AI, but there is no overarching theory of deception for learning agents in games. We introduce a formal definition of deception in structural causal games, grounded in the philosophy literature, and applicable to real-world machine learning systems. Several examples and results illustrate that our formal definition aligns with the philosophical and commonsense meaning of deception. Our main technical result is to provide graphical criteria for deception. We show, experimentally, that these results can be used to mitigate deception in reinforcement learning agents and language models.

This article investigates the practical scenarios of chasing an adversarial evader in an unbounded environment with cluttered obstacles. We propose a Voronoi-based decentralized algorithm for multiple pursuers to encircle and capture the evader by reacting to collisions. An efficient approach is presented for constructing an obstacle-aware evader-centered bounded Voronoi cell (OA-ECBVC), which strictly ensures collision avoidance in various obstacle scenarios when pursuing the evader. The evader can be efficiently enclosed in a convex hull given random initial configurations. Furthermore, to cooperatively capture the evader, each pursuer continually compresses the boundary of its OA-ECBVC to quickly reduce the movement space of the evader while maintaining encirclement. Our OA-ECBVC algorithm is validated in various simulated environments with different dynamic systems of robots. Real-time performance of resisting uncertainties shows the superior reliability of our method for deployment on multiple robot platforms.

A prerequisite for safe autonomy-in-the-wild is safe testing-in-the-wild. Yet real-world autonomous tests face several unique safety challenges, both due to the possibility of causing harm during a test, as well as the risk of encountering new unsafe agent behavior through interactions with real-world and potentially malicious actors. We propose a framework for conducting safe autonomous agent tests on the open internet: agent actions are audited by a context-sensitive monitor that enforces a stringent safety boundary to stop an unsafe test, with suspect behavior ranked and logged to be examined by humans. We design a basic safety monitor (AgentMonitor) that is flexible enough to monitor existing LLM agents, and, using an adversarial simulated agent, we measure its ability to identify and stop unsafe situations. Then we apply the AgentMonitor on a battery of real-world tests of AutoGPT, and we identify several limitations and challenges that will face the creation of safe in-the-wild tests as autonomous agents grow more capable.

Consider that there are $k\le n$ agents in a simple, connected, and undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges. The goal of the dispersion problem is to move these $k$ agents to distinct nodes. Agents can communicate only when they are at the same node, and no other means of communication such as whiteboards are available. We assume that the agents operate synchronously. We consider two scenarios: when all agents are initially located at any single node (rooted setting) and when they are initially distributed over any one or more nodes (general setting). Kshemkalyani and Sharma presented a dispersion algorithm for the general setting, which uses $O(m_k)$ time and $\log(k+\delta)$ bits of memory per agent [OPODIS 2021]. Here, $m_k$ is the maximum number of edges in any induced subgraph of $G$ with $k$ nodes, and $\delta$ is the maximum degree of $G$. This algorithm is the fastest in the literature, as no algorithm with $o(m_k)$ time has been discovered even for the rooted setting. In this paper, we present faster algorithms for both the rooted and general settings. First, we present an algorithm for the rooted setting that solves the dispersion problem in $O(k\log \min(k,\delta))=O(k\log k)$ time using $O(\log \delta)$ bits of memory per agent. Next, we propose an algorithm for the general setting that achieves dispersion in $O(k (\log k)\cdot (\log \min(k,\delta))=O(k \log^2 k)$ time using $O(\log (k+\delta))$ bits. Finally, for the rooted setting, we give a time-optimal, i.e.,$O(k)$-time, algorithm with $O(\delta)$ bits of space per agent.

The fiercely competitive business environment and increasingly personalized customization needs are driving the digital transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. IIoT intelligence, which can provide innovative and efficient solutions for various aspects of the manufacturing value chain, illuminates the path of transformation for the manufacturing industry. It is time to provide a systematic vision of IIoT intelligence. However, existing surveys often focus on specific areas of IIoT intelligence, leading researchers and readers to have biases in their understanding of IIoT intelligence, that is, believing that research in one direction is the most important for the development of IIoT intelligence, while ignoring contributions from other directions. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of IIoT intelligence. We first conduct an in-depth analysis of the inevitability of manufacturing transformation and study the successful experiences from the practices of Chinese enterprises. Then we give our definition of IIoT intelligence and demonstrate the value of IIoT intelligence for industries in fucntions, operations, deployments, and application. Afterwards, we propose a hierarchical development architecture for IIoT intelligence, which consists of five layers. The practical values of technical upgrades at each layer are illustrated by a close look on lighthouse factories. Following that, we identify seven kinds of technologies that accelerate the transformation of manufacturing, and clarify their contributions. Finally, we explore the open challenges and development trends from four aspects to inspire future researches.

Developing aerial robots that can both safely navigate and execute assigned mission without any human intervention - i.e., fully autonomous aerial mobility of passengers and goods - is the larger vision that guides the research, design, and development efforts in the aerial autonomy space. However, it is highly challenging to concurrently operationalize all types of aerial vehicles that are operating fully autonomously sharing the airspace. Full autonomy of the aerial transportation sector includes several aspects, such as design of the technology that powers the vehicles, operations of multi-agent fleets, and process of certification that meets stringent safety requirements of aviation sector. Thereby, Autonomous Advanced Aerial Mobility is still a vague term and its consequences for researchers and professionals are ambiguous. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive perspective on the emerging field of autonomous advanced aerial mobility, which involves the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for various applications, such as urban air mobility, package delivery, and surveillance. The article proposes a scalable and extensible autonomy framework consisting of four main blocks: sensing, perception, planning, and controls. Furthermore, the article discusses the challenges and opportunities in multi-agent fleet operations and management, as well as the testing, validation, and certification aspects of autonomous aerial systems. Finally, the article explores the potential of monolithic models for aerial autonomy and analyzes their advantages and limitations. The perspective aims to provide a holistic picture of the autonomous advanced aerial mobility field and its future directions.

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has gained wide attention in recent years and has made progress in various fields. Specifically, cooperative MARL focuses on training a team of agents to cooperatively achieve tasks that are difficult for a single agent to handle. It has shown great potential in applications such as path planning, autonomous driving, active voltage control, and dynamic algorithm configuration. One of the research focuses in the field of cooperative MARL is how to improve the coordination efficiency of the system, while research work has mainly been conducted in simple, static, and closed environment settings. To promote the application of artificial intelligence in real-world, some research has begun to explore multi-agent coordination in open environments. These works have made progress in exploring and researching the environments where important factors might change. However, the mainstream work still lacks a comprehensive review of the research direction. In this paper, starting from the concept of reinforcement learning, we subsequently introduce multi-agent systems (MAS), cooperative MARL, typical methods, and test environments. Then, we summarize the research work of cooperative MARL from closed to open environments, extract multiple research directions, and introduce typical works. Finally, we summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the current research, and look forward to the future development direction and research problems in cooperative MARL in open environments.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive progress on several open-world tasks. Recently, using LLMs to build embodied agents has been a hotspot. In this paper, we propose STEVE, a comprehensive and visionary embodied agent in the Minecraft virtual environment. STEVE consists of three key components: vision perception, language instruction, and code action. Vision perception involves the interpretation of visual information in the environment, which is then integrated into the LLMs component with agent state and task instruction. Language instruction is responsible for iterative reasoning and decomposing complex tasks into manageable guidelines. Code action generates executable skill actions based on retrieval in skill database, enabling the agent to interact effectively within the Minecraft environment. We also collect STEVE-21K dataset, which includes 600$+$ vision-environment pairs, 20K knowledge question-answering pairs, and 200$+$ skill-code pairs. We conduct continuous block search, knowledge question and answering, and tech tree mastery to evaluate the performance. Extensive experiments show that STEVE achieves at most $1.5 \times$ faster unlocking key tech trees and $2.5 \times$ quicker in block search tasks compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

This paper presents a tutorial overview of path integral (PI) control approaches for stochastic optimal control and trajectory optimization. We concisely summarize the theoretical development of path integral control to compute a solution for stochastic optimal control and provide algorithmic descriptions of the cross-entropy (CE) method, an open-loop controller using the receding horizon scheme known as the model predictive path integral (MPPI), and a parameterized state feedback controller based on the path integral control theory. We discuss policy search methods based on path integral control, efficient and stable sampling strategies, extensions to multi-agent decision-making, and MPPI for the trajectory optimization on manifolds. For tutorial demonstrations, some PI-based controllers are implemented in Python, MATLAB and ROS2/Gazebo simulations for trajectory optimization. The simulation frameworks and source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/INHA-Autonomous-Systems-Laboratory-ASL/An-Overview-on-Recent-Advances-in-Path-Integral-Control.