Cooperation

A fundamental, quantitative, understanding of coordination and cooperation between decentralised autonomous agents is a central goal of the control research programme. The partners have previously explored methods employing information theory, cooperative differential games and the theory of teams. Research in cooperation will focus on:

1. The development of mutual information gain as a utility metric for cooperation amongst agents engaged in information gathering, data fusion and mapping;
2. The development of static and dynamic (single and multiple time step) team information structures allowing development of endogenous agent coordination strategies; and
3. The development of piece-wise feed-forward optimal control strategies for groups of cooperating agents, especially as a computational means of implementing team theory methods.

Research in cooperation defines a new direction in developing quantitative models of cooperation between multiple agents. Research in cooperation will be led by Tomonari Furukawa.