Cooperation via Environmental Dynamics Caused by Multi Robots in a Hostile Environment

Cooperation is one the most important issues in multiagent systems. There is a trade-off between the centralized control and the distributed one from the performance viewpoint of cooperation. This paper proposes a method to emerge cooperative behaviors via environmental dynamics caused by multi robots in a hostile environment without any planning for cooperation. Each robot has its own policy to achieve the goal with/without explicit social behavior such as yielding. Co-existence of such robots in a dynamic, hostile environment produces various environmental dynamics, in which the heterogeneous robots can be seen as cooperating each other. The experimental results performed in the F2000 league at RoboCup-2000, Melbourne is discussed, and the future issue is given.