TEAMCORE:

Rapidly Building Dynamic, Robust Teams
from Distributed, Heterogeneous Agents

With the promise of agent-based system, a variety of research/industrial groups are developing autonomous, heterogeneous agents, that are distributed over a variety of platforms and environments in cyberspace. Rapid integration of such distributed, heterogeneous agents would enable software to be rapidly developed to address large-scale problems of interest. Unfortunately, rapid and robust integration remains a difficult challenge. To address this challenge, we are developing a novel teamwork-based agent integration framework.

In this framework, software developers first specify an agent organization through team-oriented programming. To recruit agents for this organization, an agent resources manager (an analogue of a ``human resources manager'') searches for agents of interest to this organization, and monitors their performance over time. Agents in this organization are wrapped with TEAMCORE wrappers, that make them team ready, and thus ensure robust, flexible teamwork among the members of the newly formed organization. This implemented framework promises to reduce the software development effort in agent integration while providing robustness due to its teamwork-based foundations. We have successfully demonstrated this framework in a NEO TIE as part of the DARPA Control of Agent-based Systems (COABS) program. Teamcore is also part of the Electric Elves Project at ISI.

Team Members

• Prof. Milind Tambe (PI) 
• Prof. Wei-min Shen (Co-PI)  
• Dr. David V. Pynadath 
• Pragnesh "Jay" Modi 
• Chandrashekar Ramanan

Past Project Members

• Lei Ding
• Neelesh Gokhale
• Nicolas Chauvat

Karma-TEAMCORE Framework

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Major funding for this project is provided by the Defense Research Advanced Project Agency (DARPA), Control of Agent-based Systems (COABS) program. Prof. Jim Hendler is the program manager for this program.