Observation-Based Proactive Communication in Multi-Agent Teamwork

Multi-agent teamwork is governed by the same principles that underlie human cooperation. This paper describes how to give agents the same cooperative capabilities, observability and proactivity, that humans use. We show how agents can use observation of the environment and of teammates’ actions to estimate the teammates’ beliefs without generating unnecessary messages; we also show how agents can anticipate information needs among the team members and proactively communicate the information, reducing the total volume of communication. Finally, we present several experiments that validate the system developed, explore the effectiveness of different aspects of observability and introduce the scalability of the use of observability with respect to the number of agents in a system.