Analyzing dangers in multiagent rescue using DEFACTO

Abstract

Enabling interactions of agent-teams and humans for safe and effective Multiagent rescue is a critical area of research, with encouraging progress in the past few years. However, previous work suffers from three key limitations: (i) limited human situational awareness, reducing human effectiveness in directing agent teams, (ii) the agent team's rigid interaction strategies that jeopardize the rescue operation, and (iii) lack of formal tools to analyze the impact of such interaction strategies. This paper presents a software prototype called DEFACTO (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence). DEFACTO is based on a software proxy architecture and 3D visualization system, which addresses the three limitations mentioned above. First, the 3D visualization interface enables human virtual omnipresence in the environment, improving human situational awareness and ability to assist agents. Second, generalizing past work on adjustable autonomy, the agent team chooses among a variety of "team-level" interaction strategies, even excluding humans from the loop in extreme circumstances. Third, analysis tools help predict the dangers of using fixed strategies for various agent teams in a future disaster response simulation scenario. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.