In this dissertation, control methodologies for systems of multiple mobile agents facing multiple objectives are considered. Carefully constructed objective functions for agents interested in any or all of collision avoidance, robust communications, waypoint following, and dynamic coverage objectives are presented. Theory relevant to gradient-like control laws designed using over-approximations...

The embedding of self-organizing inter-agent processes in distributed software applications enables the decentralized coordination system elements, solely based on concerted, localized interactions. The separation and encapsulation of the activities that are conceptually related to the coordination, is a crucial concern for systematic development practices in order to prepare the reuse and syst...

In order for multi-agent systems to exhibit global coherence the agents must coordinate their activities or be limited to a problem space in which activities are highly independent. In the elder care domain, global coherence across the agent system responsible for giving the care requires coordination if only because the different agents in the system interact over a set of shared resources, na...

Multi-agent coordination is an important and complicated process. This paper proposes a layered approach to coordination in which low-level domain independent coordination and scheduling modules deal with detailed temporal and resource constraints and high-level controllers focus on domain issues and domain state. A general agent architecture is described based on this agent control model. The ...

Decentralized, partially or fully distributed multi-agent coordination, cooperation and coalition formation have been studied extensively over the past 20 years. Ensembles of autonomous software, robotic or other autonomous agents may need to coordinate and form coalitions in order to share resources, divide-and-conquer tasks, or enable themselves to complete tasks too complex for any individua...

The agent view provides maybe the right level of abstraction for dealing with complex, distributed problem-solving systems. It abstracts from aspects like the hardware or software platforms of various components or the internal structure, methods or processing of these components, focusing attention on how complex, heterogenous, distributed and evolving systems can be built from interoperable e...

Coordination and cooperation of artificial autonomous agents is activity for effective problems solution. Coalition formation is by one of cooperative mechanisms used in multi-agent systems. Various approaches of multi-agent coalition formation ensure coalition stability, optimal allocation of sources and payoff distribution for efficient achievement of individual or collective goals. The paper...

due to their advantages, omni-directional mobile robots have found many applications especially in robotic soccer competitions. however, omni directional navigation system, omni-vision system and kicking mechanism in such mobile robots have not ever been combined. this situation brings the idea of a robot with no head direction into existence, a comprehensive omni directional mobile robot. such...

In this paper we report on using a relational state space in multi-agent reinforcement learning. There is growing evidence in the Reinforcement Learning research community that a relational representation of the state space has many benefits over a propositional one. Complex tasks as planning or information retrieval on the web can be represented more naturally in relational form. Yet, this rel...

With increasing deployment of multi-agent and distributed systems, there is an increasing need for failure diagnosis systems. While successfully tackling key challenges in multi-agent settings, modelbased diagnosis has left open the diagnosis of coordination failures, where failures often lie in the boundaries between agents, and thus the inputs to the model—with which the diagnoser simulates t...