We investigate the role of communication in the coordination of cooperative robot teams and its impact on performance in search and retrieval tasks. We first discuss a baseline without communication and analyse various kinds of coordination strategies for exploration and exploitation. We then discuss how the robots construct a shared mental model by communicating beliefs and/or goals with one a...

Inspection is an effective but also expensive quality assurance activity to find defects early during software development. The defect detection process, team size, and staff hours invested can have a considerable impact on the defect detection effectiveness and cost-benefit of an inspection. In this paper, we use empirical data and a probabilistic model to estimate this impact for nominal (non...

The CMUNITED-98 small-size robot team is a complete autonomous architecture composed of the physical robotic agents, a global vision-processing camera overlooking the playing field, and several clients as the minds of the small-size robot players. The global vision algorithm perceives the environment and processes the images, giving the positions of each robot and the ball. This information is ...

In this paper we investigate the effects that team size has on geographically distributed teams within a large, multi-national manufacturing organization. Survey responses from 109 members of distributed teams indicate that compared to members of larger teams, members of smaller teams participated more actively on their team, were more committed to their team, were more aware of the goals of th...

An important aim of the current research effort in artificial intelligence and robotics is to achieve cooperative agent behavior for teams of robots in real-world scenarios. Especially in the RoboCup scenario, but also in other projects like Nexus, agents have to cooperate efficiently to reach certain goals. In the RoboCup project, cooperative team-play and team strategies similar to real world...

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the parameterized complexity of model checking for Dependence and Independence logic, which are well studied logics in area Team Semantics. We start with a list nine immediate parameterizations problem, namely number disjunctions (i.e. splits)/(free) variables/universal quantifiers, formula-size, tree-width Gaifman graph input structure, size universe/team...

In this paper, we describe the GMD-Robots. These robots will be presented at the RoboCup 1999. RoboCup is the robot world cup soccer games and conferences. It offers the opportunity to examine a wide range of technologies in different research areas. RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple moving robots in a dynamic environment. In order for a robot team to actually perform a soccer game vario...

This paper presents three case-based reasoning (CBR) prototypes developed for the RoboCats, a team of five soccer playing robots in the RoboCup small size league. CBR is used to help the RoboCats plan individual moves and team strategies, as well as to model the world of the playing field. More specifically, the case-based reasoners position the goalie, select team formations, and recognize gam...

In a heterogeneous multi-robot team, a task solution is highly dependent on the available collection of robots and their sensing and computational capabilities. We are interested in the problem of automatic synthesis of task solutions. Previous solutions to this problem include a heuristic search on the whole solution space or using an offline genetic algorithm for generating schema chunks and ...