CMU FRC Seminar: Balancing Profit and Flexibility in a Partially-Committed Market-Based Multi-Agent System

Speaker: E. Gil Jones, PhD Student, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Date: FRIDAY, October 28

Abstract: I am interested in creating a market-based multi-robot coordination mechanism specifically designed for domains where a group of robots actively interact with a human operator - for instance, imagine a group of mining robots carrying out tasks generated dynamically by a human foreman. In these domains I picture a human operator generating a continuous stream of tasks, with the market-based system allocating those tasks to robots in such a way that maximizes a performance metric set by the operator. This performance metric may factor in the relative importance of tasks as well as increased urgency for some tasks. This talk will address the realization of a market-based multi-agent system capable of providing good allocation solutions given such performance metrics. I will discuss my current system implementation and present initial simulation results that illustrate how a market-based approach can provide reasonable solutions for a sample domain. Additionally, I will discuss the difficulties created by moving from a zero-commitment scheme, where robots are not required to complete tasks that they've been contracted to perform, to a partial-commitment scheme, where penalties are assessed for robots who fail to complete tasks. Robots may severely reduce their overall performance by agreeing to highly restrictive tasks; I'll present a learning approach such that robots can learn the value of retaining flexibility, balancing the profit of restrictive tasks versus the possibility of future opportunities.

Speaker Bio: Gil is a second year Ph.D. student at the Robotics Institute, and is co-advised by Bernardine Dias and Tony Stentz. His primary interest is market-based multi-robot coordination; he also dabbles in human-multi-robot interaction and economic agent theory. He received his BA in Computer Science from Swarthmore College in 2001, and spent two years as a software engineer at Bluefin Robotics - manufacturer of autonomous underwater vehicles - in Cambridge, Mass.