Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems

(Andrew Barto, Rod Grupen, Victor Lesser, Sridhar Mahadevan, Lee Osterweil, Shlomo Zilberstein)

Agents are autonomous, heterogeneous, persistent, computing entities that interact with the environment through sensing and effecting, and communicate and coordinate their operation with other agents. Agents must cope with limited computational resources, uncertainty and limited knowledge of the environment. Agents can perform tasks locally if they have sufficient knowledge and resources, and they can interact with other agents to help in the completion of tasks. We study how to design agents and societies of agents, and how to monitor and control their operation. We approach the problem from a variety of perspectives that include cognitive science, decision-theory, game-theory, heuristic search, machine learning and software-engineering. Target applications include factory optimization, perception, robotics, situation assessment, e-commerce, and information retrieval and gathering.

Autonomous Learning Laboratory
The Autonomous Learning Laboratory (ALL), formerly the Adaptive NetWorks (ANW) Laboratory, focuses on both machine and biological learning. Areas of study include reinforcement learning, artificial neural networks, and biologically-inspired models of adaptive motor control.

Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research
The Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) is investigating the issues surrounding the development of complex software, and the construction of software environments. LASER research emphasizes software analysis and software process.

Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics
The Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics investigates planning and control methodologies for complex, multi-objective robotic systems, geometric reasoning for automated assembly planning, and robot learning. Research platforms include integrated hand/arm systems, mobile robots, legged systems, and articulated stereo heads.

Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory
The Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory is concerned with the development and analysis of sophisticated AI problem-solving and control architectures for both single-agent and multiple-agent systems. Current research projects include cooperative information gathering, distributed situation assessment, distributed scheduling, auditory scene analysis, multi-agent learning of coordination strategies, multi-agent coordination and negotiation protocols.

Resource-Bounded Reasoning Research Group
The Resource-Bounded Reasoning Research Group studies the construction of intelligent systems that can operate in real-time environments under uncertainty and limited computational resources. The group conducts research in decision theory, real-time planning, autonomous agent architectures and reasoning under uncertainty.