Market-Driven Multi-Agent Collaboration in Robot Soccer Domain

In recent robotic studies, in many key areas decoupled multi-agent systems have become more popular than complex single agent systems, where the former is more robust, fast and cheap to implement. The most important reason behind this preference is to eliminate the possibility of single point of failure, which is a vital concern for single complex agents. Usage of decoupled multi-agent systems may also reduce the total cost of the entire system when it is possible to use a team of single cheap robots for performing complex tasks, instead of building up a single complex and expensive robot to satisfy all the system needs. As a result, typically when a team of robots is used, the system throughput increases while the total cost decreases. Since the robots usually have simpler physical structures, generally less complicated controller programs are necessary to manipulate the agents. The decoupled behaviors of agents can cause communication and coordination problems, however. The studies in (Dudek