For the long term co-existence of robots with us in complete harmony, they will be expected to show sociocognitive behaviors. In this paper, taking inspiration from child development research and human behavioral psychology we will identify the basic but key capabilities: perceiving abilities, effort and affordances. Further we will present the concepts, which fuse these components to perform multi-effort ability and affordance analysis. We will show instantiations of these capabilities on real robot and will discuss its potential applications for more complex socio-cognitive behavior.

This paper presents a dynamic role assignment and formation positioning system used by the 2011 RoboCup 3D simulation league champion UT Austin Villa. This positioning system was a key component in allowing the team to win all 24 games it played at the competition during which the team scored 136 goals and conceded none. The positioning system was designed to allow for decentralized coordination among physically realistic simulated humanoid soccer playing robots in the partially observable, non-deterministic, noisy, dynamic, and limited communication setting of the RoboCup 3D simulation league simulator. Although the positioning system is discussed in the context of the RoboCup 3D simulation environment, it is not domain specific and can readily be employed in other RoboCup leagues as it generalizes well to many realistic and real-world multiagent systems.

Cooperative multi-agent path planning around a common location has many applications, and has received significant at- tention from the research community. Our research is motivated by the need for groups of autonomous vehicles or mobile robots to collaboratively plan efficient paths around shared navigational coordinates (waypoints) in a distributed and decentralized manner. Our ongoing research is focused on creating a distributed solution to Dresner and Stone’s Autonomous Intersection Management problem. In the future we plan to relax the constraints of this problem, and allow more flexibility in the angles of approach and departure from a single waypoint, and also plan to consider efficient group plans for multi-waypoint routes. In this paper we briefly introduce intersection management, present preliminary results for an unstructured peer-to-peer approach to the problem, and discuss future research directions.

The Next-Generation Transportation program coordinates the evolution and transformation of the current air-traffic management (ATM) system for the National Airspace System (NAS). Currently the NAS has a limited capacity and cannot handle the increasing future air traffic demands. However, before newly proposed ATM concepts are deployed they must be rigorously evaluated under realistic conditions. This paper presents AGENTFLY, an emerging NAS-wide highfidelity multi-agent ATM simulator with precise emulation of the human controller operation workload model and human-system interaction. The simulator is validated using a flight scenario developed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that is based on real data. We present preliminary results focusing on the accuracy of the simulated controllers within AGENTFLY.

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is a technology that allows a vehicle to automatically adjust its speed to maintain a preset distance from the vehicle in front of it based on the driver's preferences. Individual drivers have different driving styles and preferences. Current systems do not distinguish among the users. We introduce a method to combine machine learning algorithms with demographic information and expert advice into existing automated assistive systems. This method can save on the interactions between drivers and automated systems by adjusting parameters relevant to the operation of these systems based on their specific drivers and context of drive. We also learn when users tend to engage and disengage the automated system. This method sheds light on the kinds of dynamics that users develop while interacting with automation and can teach us how to improve these systems for the benefit of their users. While accepted packages such as Weka were successful in learning drivers' behavior, we found that improved learning models could be developed by adding information on drivers' demographics and a previously developed model about different driver types. We present the general methodology of our learning procedure and suggest applications of our approach to other domains as well.

This case study concerns the use of software agent advisors to improve efficiency and quality in issue tracking activities of development teams at the world's largest medical device manufacturer. Each software agent monitors, interacts with, and learns from its environment and user, recognizing when and how to provide different kinds of advice and support to facilitate issue tracking activities without directly modifying anything or otherwise violating domain constraints. The deployed software agent has not only enjoyed regular and growing use, but contributed to significant improvements. Issue rejection was significantly reduced and more focused, yielding significant quality and efficiency gains such as fewer reviews by quality assurance. This success reflects the benefits of the underlying AI technology.

The DARPA Mind’s Eye program seeks to develop in machines a capability that currently exists only in animals: visual intelligence. This paper describes a Neural-Symbolic Cognitive Agent that integrates neural learning, symbolic knowledge representation and temporal reasoning in a visual intelligent system that can reason about actions of entities observed in video. Results have shown that the system is able to learn and represent the underlying semantics of the actions from observation and use this for several visual intelligent tasks, like recognition, description, anomaly detection and gap-filling.

Optimal solutions for multi-agent pathfinding problems are often too expensive to compute. For this reason, suboptimal approaches have been widely studied in the literature. Specifically, in recent years a number of efficient suboptimal algorithms that are complete for certain subclasses have been proposed at highly-rated robotics and AI conferences. However, it turns out that the problem of non-optimal multi-agent pathfinding has already been completely solved in another research community in the 1980s. In this paper, we would like to bring this earlier related work to the attention of the robotics and AI communities.

Several variants of A* have been recently proposed for find-ing optimal solutions for the multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF)problem. However, these variants have not been deeply com-pared either quantitatively or qualitatively. In this paper weaim to fill this gap. In addition to obtaining a deeper under-standing of the existing algorithms, we describe in detail theapplication of the new enhanced partial-expansion techniqueto MAPF and show how pattern databases can be applied ontop of this technique.

In our ongoing work, we aim to control a team of agents soas to achieve a prescribed goal state while being confidentthat collisions with other agents are avoided. Each agent isassociated with a feedback controlled plant, whose continu-ous state trajectories follow some stochastic differential dy-namics. To this end we describe a collision-detection modulebased on a distribution-independent probabilistic bound andemploy a fixed priority method to resolve collisions. Dueto their practical importance, multi-agent collision avoid-ance and control have been extensively studied across differ-ent communities including AI, robotics and control. How-ever, these works typically assume linear and discrete dy-namic models; by contrast, our work intends to overcomethese limitations and to present solutions for continuousstate space. While our current experiments were conductedwith linear stochastic differential equation (SDE) modelswith state-independent noise (yielding Gaussian processes)we believe that our approach could also be applicable to non-Gaussian cases with state-dependent uncertainties.