Multi-agents systems

A group of agents 20211217203347 that act on the same environment is refereed as a Multi-agent system. An example of a multi-agent system is group robotics 20210714192252.

When you are dealing with not one but many agents at the same time, there are new problems and difficulties that arise from this fact. Two important tasks have to be addressed:

  • Coordination: arranging things in a certain order.
  • Cooperation: joint actions to achieve a mutual benefit

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages when working within a group:

  • They can perform actions that couldn’t be achieved alone
  • They can perform actions in a more efficiently and better than alone
  • They can be at many places at the same time
  • The robustness increases

Some of the disadvantages are:

  • Dealing with interference between robots
  • Deal with problems in communication, both physical and logistically
  • Increased uncertainty and complexity on the environment
  • Increased hardware cost

Main problems of multi-agent systems

The main problems that these systems have are the following:

  • Designing teams is, on itself, a hard task
  • It’s hard to monitor global productivity
  • Communication is complex
  • Determining the right amount of individuality

Characteristics of groups

  • Differences in the role of the robots: Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous
  • Differences in how the robots coordinate:
    • Merely coexisting: they work in the same environment, without communication
    • Loosely coupled: they perform simple coordination but they don’t depend on each other
    • Tightly coupled: complex coordination/cooperation, with dependency on each other
  • Control of the group: centralized or distributed.
  • Communication types
    • Explicit: the robots send explicit messages between each other. This can be achieved in many ways, such as peer-to-peer, broadcasting, publisher-subscriber…
    • Implicit: each robots leaves the information in the environment without using an explicit channel so the other robots can sense and receive it.

Notes References

20211217203347 Intelligent agent

20210714192252 Robotics Basics - Group Robotics

20211217203220 INDEX - Artificial Intelligence

References

(Murphy 2000)

Murphy, Robin. 2000. Introduction to AI Robotics. Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.