Multi-Agent Coordination

This post contains demo applet and videos of our own Hormone-Inspired Icon Decluttering Algorithm. Check them out!

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The Multi-Agent Coordination Research Group is part of one of the winning teams in the DARPA LANdroids program.

The idea is that soldiers moving through an urban environment would drop deck-of-card-sized robots periodically. These “LANdroids” would then move autonomously to create a communication network and reconfigure themselves to maintain a good network as the soldiers moved. They would also heal the network if one or more LANdroids were destroyed or disabled. How will we get them to do that? Stay tuned.

The CSC team led by USC/ISI received the DARPA COORDINATORS Phase II Champion’s plaque during the Phase III kick-off meeting.

All six members of the ISI team in the CSC project members received a meritorious service award from Herb Schorr, the Director of USC Information Sciences Institute “for gaining recognition for ISI as the ‘predominant force’ in distributed planning and scheduling through outstanding performance on DARPA’s second competitive evaluation”. The picture below includes (from left to right) Jing Jin, Pedro Szekely, Rajiv Maheswaran, Herb Schorr, Romeo Sanchez, Craig Rogers and Nader Noori. In addition to the award, we each get spiffy plaques and a gift certificate for the cuisine of our choice. Herb Schorr suggested that we could spend it all on $1 burgers or something more substantial. I think we’re going to go for the latter. We are currently “coordinating” to choose a time and place to celebrate.

Our Commander’s Coordinator software was demonstrated at DARPATech 2007.

Details of the scenario, screenshots, and (perhaps, if you’re lucky) a video are coming soon.

You can see a video of the software at : Commander’s Coordinator.

Our CSC Team won the Phase 2 Bakeoff Competition of the DARPA COORDINATORS program by a very large (I mean seriously seriously large) margin.

There were 640 scenarios in total: 448 were created by an independent evaluation team and 64 were created by each of the three competitors. The leads for the teams were ISI, CMU and Honeywell. In the 448 scenarios created by the independent evaluation team, the distribution of the team that got the top score was:

We were happy.

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CSC project members Pedro Szekely, Rajiv Maheswaran and Craig Rogers received ISI Meritorious Service Awards “for contributions to the CSC Project Phase I at a level far exceeding the call of duty”.

Our CSC system, led by USC/ISI won the DARPA Phase 1 competition held on April, 2006 against teams led by Honeywell and SRI/CMU. The CSC system won in both the small and large scenario categories.

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The Multi-Agent Coordination research group is part of the Distributed Scalable Systems Division of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. Research focuses on coordination of autonomous agents, probabilistic reasoning, planning, scheduling and mixed-initiative frameworks.