Communication in Domains with Unreliable, Single-Channel, Low-Bandwidth Communication

Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
{pstone,veloso}@cs.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/{"7E pstone,"7E mmv}

Submitted to ICMAS'98 in November 1997

Abstract:

In most multiagent systems with communicating agents, the agents have the luxury of using reliable, multi-step negotiation protocols. They can do so primarily when communication is reliable and the cost of communication relative to other actions is small. Conversely, this paper considers multiagent environments with unreliable, high-cost communication. This paper presents techniques for dealing with the obstacles to inter-agent communication in such environments. A successful prototype system is fully implemented and tested in the simulated robotic soccer domain.

Topic Areas:

• Introduction
• Team Member Architecture
• Communication Paradigm
  • Message Targeting/Distinguishing
  • Robustness to Active Interference
  • Multiple Simultaneous Responses
  • Robustness to Lost Messages
  • Team Coordination
  • Related Work
• Implementation in the Robotic Soccer Domain
  • Our Communication Approach in the Soccer Server
  • Results
• Conclusion
• References
• About this document ...