Real-time Control of Intelligent Agents

In this demonstration we show a prototype system that allows users to issue commands to simulated actors in real-time. The interactive, real-time control is a form of Adjustable Autonomy [1, 2]. The real time control prototype, nicknamed “The Boss” is a sub-system of a complete actor specification system called EASE (End-user Actor Specification Environment). The Boss allows tasks, at varying levels of abstraction, to be assigned, withdrawn or suspended while an agent continues running. These facilities together provide the user a large amount of control over the actor at runtime. Importantly the user is not required to take back complete control of the actor in order to achieve some particular task. The Boss works by adding agents to, removing agents from or suspending agents in the multi-agent system (MAS) which in turn controls the actor. Because the addition and removal of agents to the multi-agent system happens continually even without user interaction, the overall behavior of the simulated actor is smoothly integrates a user’s adhoc commands.