Towards Heterogeneous Agent Teams

Agent integration architectures enable a heterogeneous, distributed set of agents to work together to address problems of greater complexity than those addressed by the individual agents themselves. Unfortunately, integrating software agents and humans to perform real-world tasks in a large-scale system remains difficult, especially due to two key challenges: ensuring robust execution in the face of a dynamic environment and providing abstract task specifications without all the low-level coordination details. To address these challenges, our Teamcore project provides the integration architecture with general-purpose teamwork coordination capabilities. We make each agent team-ready by providing it with a proxy capable of general teamwork reasoning. Thus, a key novelty and strength of our framework is that powerful teamwork capabilities are built into its foundations by providing the proxies themselves with a teamwork model called STEAM. While STEAM has earlier been demonstrated in domains involving homogeneous agent teams, its use in Teamcore proxies illustrates that teamwork models may also be applied in domains involving heterogeneous agents. Given STEAM, the Teamcore proxies addresses the first agent integration challenge, robust execution, by automatically generating the required coordination actions for the agents they represent. We can also exploit the proxies' reusable general teamwork knowledge to address the second agent integration challenge. Through team-oriented programming, a developer specifies a hierarchical organization and its goals and plans, abstracting away from coordination details. Our integration architecture enables teamwork among agents with no coordination capabilities, and it establishes and automates consistent teamwork among agents with some coordination capabilities. We illustrate how the Teamcore architecture successfully addressed the challenges of agent integration in two application domains: simulated rehearsal of a military evacuation mission and facilitation of human collaboration.