Designing Control Laws for Cooperative Agent Teams

The design of the control laws governing the behavior of individual agents is crucial for the successful development of cooperative agent teams. These control laws utilize a combination of local and/or global knowledge to achieve the resulting group behavior. A key diiculty in this development is determining the appropriate balance between the use of global information and the use of local information to achieve coherent cooperation without excessive communication requirements. This paper addresses this issue by presenting some general guidelines and principles for determining the appropriate level of global versus local control. These principles are illustrated and implemented in a \keep formation" cooperative task case study, which presents several alternative control strategies along the local versus global spectrum. In this case study, we present experimental data that demonstrate that local control alone is not suucient to meet the goals of certain tasks, and that an increasing use of global knowledge can result in a steadily improving group cooperation. We conclude that the use of local control information to ground global knowledge in the current situation is perhaps the best way to achieve the proper balance between local and global control.