CS344M: Autonomous Multiagent Systems -- Fall 2012: Resources Page

Resources for Autonomous Multiagent Systems (cs344M)

Week 0: Introduction

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf). The slides on RoboCup.
  • Austin Villa robot soccer team with some links to videos from previous competitions such as the 2012 SPL Final
  • RoboCup 2012 Walk through Video
  • RoboCup Rescue Video
  • RoboCup Small Size Video
  • RoboCup Mid Size Video
  • RoboCup Kid Size Video
  • RoboCup Adult Size Video
  • RoboCup Austin Villa SPL Highlights Video
  • RoboCup 2012 3D Simulation Final Video
  • RoboCup 2012 2D Simulation Final Video

    • Week 1: Autonomous agents

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • Google blog post about their autonomous cars.
  • Paper on mapping and localization for autonomous driving.

    • Week 2: Agent architectures

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • A journal article with more details on the initial subsumption implementation:
    Brooks, R. A. "A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 1986, pp. 1423; also MIT AI Memo 864, September 1985. The detail slides from that article.
  • Intelligence without Robots (A Reply to Brooks) by Oren Etzioni. AI Magazine, 14(4), December 1993.
  • A radio interview with Rodney Brooks.
  • Pengo
  • Structured Control for Autonomous Robots.
    Reid Simmons.
    IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 10:1, pp. 34-43, February 1994.
  • Implementing a Learning System for Subsumption Architectures.
    John Shewchuk, Paul Viola.
    1989 Technical Report
  • Design and Optimization of an Omnidirectional Humanoid Walk: A Winning Approach at the RoboCup 2011 3D Simulation Competition.
    Patrick MacAlpine, Samuel Barrett, Daniel Urieli, Victor Vu, and Peter Stone.
    AAAI 2012.
  • Positioning to Win: A Dynamic Role Assignment and Formation Positioning System.
    Patrick MacAlpine, Francisco Barrera, and Peter Stone.
    RoboCup Symposium 2012.
    •

    Week 3: Multiagent systems

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
    The ones on the pursuit domain (pdf)
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • The RETSINA agent architecture from CMU.
  • New York Times article about Rodney Brooks' Rethink Robotics.

    • Week 4: Agent communication and Teamwork

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • The RoboEarth Project.
  • The RoboEarth language: Representing and Exchanging Knowledge about Actions, Objects, and Environments.
    Moritz Tenorth, Alexander Clifford Perzylo, Reinhard Lafrenz, Michael Beetz.
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  • Robot ordering a sandwich video
  • Additional readings on communication:
  • Textbook: chapters 6-7 in 2nd edition or chapter 8 in 1st edition
    **OR**
    Sections 2.1 and 2.2 (pages 1-19) of Multiagent Systems and Societies of Agents.
    Michael N. Huhns and Larry M. Stephens.
    Chapter 2 in Multiagent Systems, G. Weiss (ed.), MIT Press, 1998.
  • Agent Communication Languages: The Current Landscape.
     Yannis Labrou, Tim Finin, and Yun Peng.
    IEEE Inteligent Systems, March/April, 1999.
  • Agent Communication Languages: Rethinking the Principles.
    Munindar Singh.
    IEEE Computer, 1998.
  • Desiderata for Agent Communication Languages. (postscript version)
    James Mayfield, Yannis Labrou, and Tim Finin.
    Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium on Information Gathering from Heterogeneous, Distributed Environments, AAAI-95 Spring Symposium, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. March 27-29, 1995.
  • Additional readings on teamwork:
  • Towards Flexible Teamwork.
     Tambe, M.
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Volume 7, pages 83-124, 1997.
  • Regarding ontologies, Cyc and its open-source version, OpenCyc.
  • The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO).
  • FIPA sample applications
  • FIPA ACL in XML
  • JADE: Java Agent Development Framework.
  • A paper on evoving communication languages: Talking Helps: Evolving Communicating Agents for the Predator-Prey Pursuit Problem by Jim and Giles
  • A paper on an ACL for soccer agents: CommLang: Communication for Coachable Agents by Divan, Riley, and Veloso.
  • Papers from Luc Steels group on language learning:
    Sharp Transition towards Shared Vocabularies in Multi-Agent Systems
    Experiments on the emergence of human Communication
    The Evolution of Communication Systems by Adaptive Agents
    Intelligence with Representation

    • Week 5: RoboCup case studies

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • Some slides (on genetic algorithms - from Tom Mitchell's book Machine Learning)
  • Slides on an architecture for action selection (pdf).
  • Some code for soft arithmetic from the architecture for action selection paper.
  • A 1999 salon.com article on Darwin United.
  • The undergraduate writing center
  • Reactive Deliberation: An Architecture for Real-time Intelligent Control in Dynamic Environments.
    Michael K. Sahota.
    Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1994.
    (From the group that invented robotic soccer: pre-RoboCup)
  • Co-evolving Soccer Softbot Team Coordination with Genetic Programming.
     Sean Luke, Charles Hohn, Jonathan Farris, Gary Jackson, and James Hendler.
    in Kitano (ed.) RoboCup-97: Robot Soccer World Cup I. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998
    (1997 evolutionary learning approach)
  • A Role-Based Decision-Mechanism for Teams of Reactive and Coordinating Agents.
     Slivia Coradeschi and Lars Karlsson.
    in Kitano (ed.) RoboCup-97: Robot Soccer World Cup I. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998
    (an early, successful approach)
  • AT Humboldt -- Development, Practice and Theory.
    Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Markus Hannebauer, Jan Wendler.
    in Kitano (ed.) RoboCup-97: Robot Soccer World Cup I. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998
    (1997 champion)
  • Behavior Networks for Continuous Domains using Situation-Dependent Motivations.
     Klaus Dorer.
    Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1999.
    (1999 runner-up)
  • The CMUnited-99 Champion Simulator Team.
     Peter Stone, Patrick Riley, and Manuela Veloso.
    in M. Veloso, E. Pagello and H. Kitano (eds.) RoboCup-99: Robot Soccer World Cup III. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
    (1998, 1999 champion)
  • FC Portugal Team Description: RoboCup 2000 Simulation League Champion.
     Luis Paulo Reis and Nuno Lau.
    in Stone, Balch, Kraetzschmarr (eds.) RoboCup-2000: Robot Soccer World Cup IV. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2001.
    (2000 champion)
  • Behavior Classification with Self-Organizing Maps.
    M. Wunstel, D. Polani, T. Uthmann, and J. Perl.
    In: P. Stone, T.Balch, and G. Ktaetzschmar (eds.): RoboCup 2000: Robot Soccer World Cup IV. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York (Springer-Verlag), pages 108-118, 2000. (Lecture Notes in computer science Vol. 2019: Lecture notes in artificial intelligence)
  • Learning Situation Dependent Success Rates of Actions in a RoboCup Scenario.
     Sebastian Buck, Martin Riedmiller.
    Pacific Rim International Coference on Artificial Intelligence, 2000.
    (2000 and 2001 runner-up)
  • Using Machine Learning Techniques in Complex Multi-Agent Domains.
     Martin Riedmiller, Artur Merke
    in I. Stamatescu, W. Menzel, M. Richter and U. Ratsch (eds.), Perspectives on Adaptivity and Learning (2002), LNCS, Springer
    (2000 and 2001 runner-up)
  • Towards an Optimal Scoring Policy for Simulated Soccer Agents.
     Jelle R. Kok, Remco de Boer, Nikos Vlassis, and F.C.A. Groen.
    In G. Kaminka, P.U. Lima, and R. Rojas, editors, RoboCup 2002: Robot Soccer World Cup VI, pages 292-299, Fukuoka, Japan, 2002. Springer-Verlag.
    (2001 3rd place, 2002 4th place)
  • Multi-robot decision making using coordination graphs
     Jelle R. Kok, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, and Nikos Vlassis.
    In A.T. de Almeida and U. Nunes, editors, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR'03, pages 1124-1129, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30-July 3 2003.
    (2003 champion)
  • Advice Generation from Observed Execution: Abstract Markov Decision Process Learning.
     Patrick Riley and Manuela Veloso.
    In Proceedings of the Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2004), 2004.
    (2001 coach competition champion)
  • Global Planning from Local Perspective: An Implementation of Observation-based Plan Coordination in RoboCup Simulation Games.
     Cai Yunpeng, Chen Jiang, Yao Jinyi, and Li Shi.
    Pre-print available on-line, 2002.
    (2001, 2002 champion)
  • RoboCup Mixed Reality Competition
     Irina Gulakov1, Marco A. C. Simoes, and Ramin Fathzadeh.
    (mixed reality paper)
  • On Progress in RoboCup: The Simulation League Showcase
     Thomas Gabel and Martin Riedmiller.
    RoboCup 2010 proceedings
    (high-level view of the simulation league)
  • Team Formation for Reformation in Multiagent Domains like RoboCupRescue
     Ranjit Nair, Milind Tambe and Stacy Marsella.
    In Proceedings of RoboCup-2002 International Symposium, G. Kaminka, P. Lima and R. Roja (Eds.) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 2003.
    (Rescue paper)
  • Simple Method for Decision Making in RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D Environment
     Khashayar Niki Maleki, Mohammad Hadi Valipour, Roohollah Yeylaghi Ashrafi, Sadegh Mokari, M. R. Jamali, Caro Lucas.
    Revista Avances en Sistemas e Informatica, Vol. 5, No. 3, December 2008.
    Paper from the 3D simulation league when it used spheres
  • The UT Austin Villa 3D Simulation Soccer Team 2008
     Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Yinon Bentor, and Peter Stone.
    Technical Report AI09-01, The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Sciences, AI Laboratory, 2009.
    3D simulation league team description
  • The high-level communication model for multiagent coordination in the RoboCupRescue Simulator"
     S.B.M. Post, M.L. Fassaert, A. Visser.
    in D. Polani, B. Browning, A. Bonarini, K. Yoshida (Eds.), RoboCup 2003, Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3020, p. 503-509, 2004. Springer Verlag, Berlin.
  • Language Design for Rescue Agents
     Itsuki Noda, Tomoichi Takahashi, Shuji Morita, Tetsuhiko Koto, Satoshi Tadokoro
    in Digital Cities II : Second Kyoto Workshop on Digital Cities, Kyoto, Japan, October 18-20, 2001
  • Design and Optimization of an Omnidirectional Humanoid Walk: A Winning Approach at the RoboCup 2011 3D Simulation Competition
     Patrick MacAlpine, Samuel Barrett, Daniel Urieli, Victor Vu, and Peter Stone.
    AAAI 2012.
    (Accompanying videos)
  • Positioning to Win: A Dynamic Role Assignment and Formation Positioning System
     Patrick MacAlpine, Francisco Barrera, and Peter Stone.
    In RoboCup-2012: Robot Soccer World Cup XVI, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2013.
    (Accompanying video)
  • RoboCup-2012 2D Simulation league team description papers.
  • RoboCup-2012 3D Simulation league team description papers.
  • The official 2012 simulation league competition page.

    • Week 6: Swarms and self-organization

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • A paper on pair programming.
  • Project page on continual area sweeping (with videos).
  • Soccer server internet league
  • Team repository (up to 2002)!
  • Sven Koenig's Ant Robotics page, including a link to a java applet illustrating node counting!
  • Israel Wagner's ant robotics page
  • An ant robot simulation page from a seminar at the Technion.
  • A video on pheromone robotics for cooperative sensing.
  • Craig Reynolds' demos of many agents steering to avoid one another based on simple local rules. (see in particular the ones under "combined behaviors and groups")
  • Trail-Laying Robots for Robust Terrain Coverage.
     J. Svennebring and S. Koenig.
    In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2003.
  • Self-Organised Task Allocation in a Group of Robots.
    Labella T.H., Dorigo M., Deneubourg J.-L.
    In R. Alami, editor, Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS04). Toulouse, France, June 23-25, 2004.
  • Blazing a trail: insect-inspired resource transportation by a robot team.
    Richard T. Vaughan, Kasper Stoy, Gaurav S. Sukhatme and Maja J Mataric.
    In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robot Systems, 2000.
  • AntNet: Distributed Stigmergetic Control for Communications Networks
     Di Caro, G. and Dorigo, M.
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 9, pages 317-365 (1998).
  • When Ants Play Chess (Or Can Strategies Emerge From Tactical Behaviors?)
     Alexis Drogoul
    From Reaction to Cognition --- Fifth European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, MAAMAW-93 (LNAI Volume 957)
  • Progress in Pheromone Robotics.
    D. Payton, R. Estkowski, M. Howard.
    7th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, March 25-27, 2002, Marina del Rey, CA.
  • Multi-Objective Optimization of Cancer Chemotherapy Using Swarm Intelligence.
    Andrei Petrovski , John Mccall , and Bhavani Sudha.
  • Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules.
    A. Jadbabaie and Jie Lin and A.S. Morse.
  • Statistical mechanics for natural flocks of birds.
    William Bialeka and Andrea Cavagnab and Irene Giardinab and Thierry Morad and Edmondo Silvestrib and Massimiliano Vialeb and Aleksandra Walczak.

    • Week 7: Applications

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • UT Austin Villa 2D Simulation Coach rcssjava code release (useful for some 2D simulation final projects)
  • Kiva systems demo
  • Kiva Daily Planet Video
  • Kiva homepage.
  • Autonomous Intersection Management homepage with some follow-up papers and videos.
  • NY Times article on autonomous cars
  • Audi's autonomous car
  • Some applications papers read during previous years:
  • Distributed Agent-based Air Traffic Flow Management.
     K. Tumer and A. Agogino.
    In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2007.
  • BDI-agents: from theory to practice.
     A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff.
    In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), 1995.
  • Improving Elevator Performance Using Reinforcement Learning.
    R. Crites and A. Barto.
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 8 (NIPS8), D. S. Touretzky, M. C. Mozer, and M. E. Hasslemo (Eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 1017-1023.
  • Electric Elves : Applying Agent Technology to Support Human Organizations.
     Chalupsky, H., Gil, Y., Knoblock, C. A., Lerman, K., Oh, J., Pynadath, D., Russ, T. A., and Tambe, M.
    In proceedings of the International Conference of Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI'01), 2001.
  • ARCHON: A Distributed Artificial Intelligence System for Industrial Applications.
     D. Cockburn and N. R. Jennings.
    in Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (eds. G. M. P. O'Hare and N. R. Jennings)
    Wiley, 1996, 319-344.
  • Trafficopter: A Distributed Collection System for Traffic Information.
     Alexandros Moukas1 Konstantinos Chandrinos, and Pattie Maes.
    in (M. Klusch, G. Weiss eds.) Cooperative Information Agents II, Springer Verlag, 1998.
  • 5th Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation
  • An article in Wired about traffic intersections without any signs.

    • Week 8: Game Theory

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • Game theory slides from the course textbook.
  • A study on Iterated Dominance and Nash Equilibrium
  • A brief survey on Multiagent Learning.
  • gametheory.net
  • Some useful slides (part C) from Michael Bowling on game theory, stochastic games, correlated equilibria; and (Part D) from Michael Littman with more on stochastic games.
  • A suite of game generators called GAMUT from Stanford.
  • Prisoner's dilemma contest
  • RoShamBo (rock-paper-scissors) contest
  • The Iocaine Powder RoShamBo agent
  • U. of Alberta page on automated poker.

    • Week 9: Game theory II + Statistical Measurement

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • A good statistics tutorial.
  • On-line calculators of t-tests
  • Dr. Raymond Mooney's slides on statistical significance testing

    • Week 10: Distributed Rational Decision Making

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Condorcet voting example
  • Types of tactical voting
  • Condorcet voting software
  • voteengine: python voting software
  • An applet illustrating some voting methods (see for further explanation)
  • Proof of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem

    • Week 11: Auctions

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • Some writing tips. Some more (with more detail).
  • Peter's class on Agent-Based E-Commerce from Fall 2006.
  • One of the introductory readings from that class:
    Auctions and Bidding: A Primer.
    Paul Milgrom.
    The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. 3. (Summer, 1989), pp. 3-22.
    Note: The above link works from UTCS machines, but may not work from an off-campus computer.
  • The Timing of Bids in Internet Auctions: Market Design, Bidder Behavior, and Artificial Agents.
    (get cached copy from upper right corner)
    Axel Ockenfels and Alvin E. Roth.
    AI Magazine, 23(3):79-88, Fall 2002.
  • A couple links about bidding rings on eBay:
  • A high-profile painting-based ring was busted.
  • Another later ring for glass.
  • Making More from Less: Strategic Demand Reduction in the FCC Spectrum Auctions.
    Robert J. Weber.
    The Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 6(3), 1997.
  • Self-enforcing Strategic Demand Reduction..
    Paul S. A. Reitsma, Peter Stone, Janos Csirik, and Michael L. Littman.
    In Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce IV: Designing Mechanisms and Systems, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer Verlag, 2002.
  • Decision-Theoretic Bidding Based on Learned Density Models in Simultaneous, Interacting Auctions.
    Peter Stone, Robert E. Schapire, Michael L. Littman, Janos A. Csirik, and David McAllester.
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 19:209-242, 2003.
  • SICS Trading Agent Competition (TAC)
  • Our champion supply chain management (SCM) agent (2005)
  • Our champion ad auctions (AA) agent (2009)
  • An analysis of the 2004 supply chain management trading agent competition
  • A survey of SCM agents from 2008.
  • A paper about the first few years of designing the SCM competition.
  • Spectrum auction data

    • Week 12: Agent modeling

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf). Some slides (on reinforcement learning - from Tom Mitchell's book Machine Learning)
  • The links to the humanoid soccer teams.
  • Peter's graduate course on Reinforcement Learning (fall 2007).
  • Sutton and Barto's book on reinforcement learning
  • Some good information on partially observable MDPs (POMDPs)
  • Effective Short-Term Opponent Exploitation in Simplified Poker.
     Bret Hoehn, Finnegan Southey, Robert C. Holte, and Valeriy Bulitko.
    AAAI 2005.
  • Particle Filtering for Dynamic Agent Modelling in Simplified Poker.
     Nolan Bard and Michael Bowling.
    In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 515-521, 2007.
  • On behavior classification in adversarial environments.
     Patrick Riley and Manuela Veloso.
    In Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS-2000), 2000.
  • Implicit Negotiation in Repeated Games.
     Michael L. Littman and Peter Stone.
    In Proceedings of The Eighth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-2001), pp. 393-404, August 2001.
  • A Concise Introduction to Multiagent Systems and Distributed AI by Nikos Vlassis. It was written for a course similar to this one.
  • The General Game Playing competition.
  • A challenge paper on teammate modeling: Ad hoc teamwork.
  • A technical ad hoc teamwork paper on game theory
  • Another one on k-armed bandits.
  • An earlier one from Michael Bowling's group at Alberta.

    • Week 13: Multiagent Learning

  • Slides from Tuesday: (pdf).
  • Slides from Thursday: (pdf).
  • Some slides on reinforcement learning - from Tom Mitchell's book Machine Learning
  • Markov games as a framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning.(citeseer link)
    Michael L. Littman.
    In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 157--163, San Francisco, CA, 1994.
  • Methods for Competitive Co-evolution: Finding Opponents Worth Beating.
     Christopher D. Rosin and Richard K. Belew.
    Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, 1995.
  • Layered Learning.
     Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso.
    Eleventh European Conference on Machine Learning, 2000.
  • Concurrent Layered Learning.
     Shimon Whiteson and Peter Stone.
    In Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, July 2003.
  • Layered Learning on Physical Robots
  • keepaway site
  • half field offense

    • Week 14: Entertainment Agents

  • Some slides on entertainment agents in general (ppt) (by Vinay Sampath Kumar). (ps.gz) (by Charles Isbell). Ones from Elaine Rich on natural language agents: (ppt).
  • Robot Jazz video
  • NERO Videos
  • Computational Model of the Brain paper and Reddit AMA
  • BoB: an Interactive Improvisational Companion.
     Belinda Thom.
    Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 2000.
  • An Architecture for Action, Emotion, and Social Behavior.
     Joseph Bates, A. Bryan Loyall, and W. Scott Reilly.
    in Artificial Social Systems: Fourth European Workshop on Modeling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1994.
    This is a paper on the Oz project
  • Creatures: Artificial Life Autonomous Software Agents for Home Entertainment.
     Stephen Grand, Dave Cliff, and Anil Malhotra.
    Millenium technical report 9601, 1996.
  • Alice recently played the Turing Original Imitation Game. See also a Slashdot article on it.
  • Article on the 2010 Loebner prize
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