Maintained by: tpaine@mit.edu         Get PDF


Census-based population autonomy


The goal of this research effort is to develop a comprehensive model of decentralized multi-agent autonomy that can express group consensus and dissensus over multiple options, heterogeneous individual behaviors that are multi-objective, and action execution via modern control analysis. This model is applied to several multi-agent scenarios and field tested using the fleet of Heron USVs at MIT and the fleet of SeaRobotics SR surveyor M1.8 operated by our collaborators at USMA West Point. We also collaborate on theoretical topics with Professor Bizyaeva at Cornell University.

Figure 1.1: Left to Right: Model overview, Multi-agent deployments at night in Charles River, MA, Multi-agent deployments in Lake Popolopen, NY.

The work on this model is on-going, but we have published preliminary work that shows it is possible, under certain conditions, to use the natural excitation properties of this model to adaptively estimate parameters of an unknown collective reward function and thus adaptively control a key parameter that influences decision-making.

Figure 1.2: Numerical simulation that confirms numerical analysis of adaptive estimation and control for multi-agent groups operating in the dissensus mode.

We find the model generalizes well to many different types of scenarios, and can be reduced to recover many other algorithms for distributed optimization. This model significantly extends previous work through the inclusion of heterogeneous behaviors among agents and allocation via the concept of dissensus. In field experiments, we find the approach is robust to time-varying network topology including dropout. This work is ongoing.

Status:Ongoing since February 2023
People:Tyler Paine
Robots:https://oceanai.mit.edu/pavlab/herons
Software:MOOS-IvP public codebase, MOOS-IvP-Pavlab codebase

Recent Publications


2024 (2 items)

  1. Tyler M. Paine, Anastasia Bizyaeva, Michael R. Benjamin, Adaptive bias for dissensus in nonlinear opinion dynamics with application to evolutionary division of labor games, 2024. (bibtex)
  2. Tyler Paine, Michael Benjamin, A Model for Multi-Agent Autonomy That Uses Opinion Dynamics and Multi-Objective Behavior Optimization, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May, 2024. (bibtex)

Document Maintained by: tpaine@mit.edu        
Page built from LaTeX source using texwiki, developed at MIT. Errata to issues@moos-ivp.org. Get PDF