Non-communicative multi-robot coordination in dynamic environments

Within a group of cooperating agents the decision making of an individual agent depends on the actions of the other agents. In dynamic environments, these dependencies will change rapidly as a result of the continuously changing state. Via a context-specific decomposition of the problem into smaller subproblems, coordination graphs offer scalable solutions to the problem of multiagent decision making. In this work, we apply coordination graphs to a continuous (robotic) domain by assigning roles to the agents and then coordinating the different roles. Moreover, we demonstrate that, with some additional assumptions, an agent can predict the actions of the other agents, rendering communication superfluous. We have successfully implemented the proposed method into our UvA Trilearn simulated robot soccer team which won the RoboCup-2003 World Championship in Padova, Italy. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.