non-cooperative agent
Unification of Consensus-Based Multi-Objective Optimization and Multi-Robot Path Planning
Wozniak Abstract --Multi-agent systems seeking consensus may also have other objective functions to optimize, requiring the research of multi-objective optimization in consensus. Several recent publications have explored this domain using various methods such as weighted-sum optimization and penalization methods. This paper reviews the state of the art for consensus-based multi-objective optimization, poses a multi-agent lunar rover exploration problem seeking consensus and maximization of explored area, and achieves optimal edge weights and steering angles by applying SQP algorithms. I NTRODUCTION AND M OTIVATION A. Background Lunar exploration is an increasingly relevant pursuit in the modern space era. The four phases of Space Development Theory (SDT) are exploration, expansion, exploitation, and exclusion [1]. For private and government-backed space entities alike, all four phases of space development are intertwined with pursuing a long-term presence on the moon. Establishing this presence can enhance the United States' economic position by achieving a net-positive economic benefit from the resources offered by the Moon and beyond. Several autonomy & control challenges are associated with the establishment of an enduring presence on the moon. Autonomy is especially relevant because unmanned exploration offers increased efficiency, enabling cooperative completion of exploration without continuous human intervention. This importance is evidenced by NASA's pursuit of a cooperative trio of rovers that can cooperate without direct input from mission controllers [2]. To this end, further research in autonomous algorithms for unmanned rovers would prove worthwhile for future exploration. The assembly of a rover formation without continuous human input can be made possible by the alignment problem.
AVOCADO: Adaptive Optimal Collision Avoidance driven by Opinion
Martinez-Baselga, Diego, Sebastián, Eduardo, Montijano, Eduardo, Riazuelo, Luis, Sagüés, Carlos, Montano, Luis
We present AVOCADO (AdaptiVe Optimal Collision Avoidance Driven by Opinion), a novel navigation approach to address holonomic robot collision avoidance when the degree of cooperation of the other agents in the environment is unknown. AVOCADO departs from a Velocity Obstacle's formulation akin to the Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance method. However, instead of assuming reciprocity, AVOCADO poses an adaptive control problem that aims at adapting in real-time to the cooperation degree of other robots and agents. Adaptation is achieved through a novel nonlinear opinion dynamics design that relies solely on sensor observations. As a by-product, based on the nonlinear opinion dynamics, we propose a novel method to avoid the deadlocks under geometrical symmetries among robots and agents. Extensive numerical simulations show that AVOCADO surpasses existing geometrical, learning and planning-based approaches in mixed cooperative/non-cooperative navigation environments in terms of success rate, time to goal and computational time. In addition, we conduct multiple real experiments that verify that AVOCADO is able to avoid collisions in environments crowded with other robots and humans.
Gaussian Process Based Message Filtering for Robust Multi-Agent Cooperation in the Presence of Adversarial Communication
Mitchell, Rupert, Blumenkamp, Jan, Prorok, Amanda
In this paper, we consider the problem of providing robustness to adversarial communication in multi-agent systems. Specifically, we propose a solution towards robust cooperation, which enables the multi-agent system to maintain high performance in the presence of anonymous non-cooperative agents that communicate faulty, misleading or manipulative information. In pursuit of this goal, we propose a communication architecture based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which is amenable to a novel Gaussian Process (GP)-based probabilistic model characterizing the mutual information between the simultaneous communications of different agents due to their physical proximity and relative position. This model allows agents to locally compute approximate posterior probabilities, or confidences, that any given one of their communication partners is being truthful. These confidences can be used as weights in a message filtering scheme, thereby suppressing the influence of suspicious communication on the receiving agent's decisions. In order to assess the efficacy of our method, we introduce a taxonomy of non-cooperative agents, which distinguishes them by the amount of information available to them. We demonstrate in two distinct experiments that our method performs well across this taxonomy, outperforming alternative methods. For all but the best informed adversaries, our filtering method is able to reduce the impact that non-cooperative agents cause, reducing it to the point of negligibility, and with negligible cost to performance in the absence of adversaries.