CommLang: Communication for Coachable Agents

RoboCup has hosted a coach competition for several years creating a challenging testbed for research in advice-giving agents. A coach agent is expected to advise an unknown coachable team. In RoboCup 2003, the coachable agents could process the coach's advice but did not include a protocol for communication among them. In this paper we present CommLang, a standard for agent communication which will be used by the coachable agents in the simulation league at RoboCup 2004. The communication standard supports representation of multiple message types which can be flexibly combined in a single utterance. We then describe the application of CommLang in our coachable agents and present empirical results showing the communication's effect on world model completeness and accuracy. Communication in our agents improved the fraction of time which our agents are confident of player and ball locations and simultaneously improved the overall accuracy of that information.