Our new teamwork structure is situated within a team member architecture suitable for PTS domains in which individual agents can capture locker-room agreements and respond to the environment, while acting autonomously. Based on a standard agent paradigm, our team member architecture allows agents to sense the environment, to reason about and select their actions, and to act in the real world. At team synchronization opportunities, the team also makes a locker-room agreement for use by all agents during periods of low communication. Figure 1 shows the functional input/output model of the architecture.
Figure 1: The team member architecture for PTS domains.
The agent keeps track of three different types of state: the world state, the locker-room agreement, and the internal state. The agent also has two different types of behaviors: internal behaviors and external behaviors.
Internal and external behaviors are similar in structure, as they are both sets of condition/action pairs where conditions are logical expressions over the inputs and actions are themselves behaviors as illustrated in Figure 2. In both cases, a behavior is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of arbitrary depth. The leaves of the DAGs are the behavior types' respective outputs: internal state changes for internal behaviors and action primitives for external behaviors.
Figure 2: Internal and external behaviors are organized in a directed acyclic graph.
Our notion of behavior is consistent with that laid out in [13]. In particular, behaviors can be nested at different levels: selection among lower-level behaviors can be considered a higher-level behavior, with the overall agent behavior considered a single ``do-the-task'' behavior. There is one such top-level internal behavior and one top-level external behavior; they are called when it is time to update the internal state or act in the world, respectively. We now introduce the team structure that builds upon this team member architecture.