Proactive Information Exchange During Team Cooperation.
Yu Zhang, Richard A. Volz, Thomas R. Ioerger, Sen Cao, John Yen · 2002
Abstract We are concerned, ultimately, with multi-agent teams involving both software and human agents in which the software agents assist in training the humans, e.g., as virtual team members. The software agents must be capable of utilizing the teamwork mechanisms used by humans. In this paper, we describe how to give agents the same implicit communication capabilities, i.e., observation, that humans use. We show how agents can use observations of the environment and teammates ' actions to estimate other agents ’ beliefs without bothering them with unnecessary messages; we also show how agents can anticipate information needs among the team and proactively exchange information, reducing the total communication volume. To achieve these goals, we add sensing capabilities to agents and present algorithms that infer teammates ' mental state from the observation. Experimental data is presented that shows that the advantage of observation in proactive information exchange as well as enhanced team performance.