1. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Empirical Study on the Effects of Synthetic Social Structures on Teams of Autonomous Vehicles Adam Campbell Dr. Annie S. Wu University of Central Florida Orlando, FL Dr. Randall Shumaker Keith Garfield Institute for Simulation and Training Orlando, FL Dr. Sean Luke Dr. Kenneth A. De Jong George Mason University Fairfax, VA

2. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Overview Motivation Approach  Control system  Synthetic social structures Experiments Results Discussion Future work

3. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Motivation for multi-agent social interactions Natural systems  Human social interactions Decentralized coordinated control  If one agent malfunctions, others should behave properly Resource allocation  Processes  CPU time  Children  time from parents  Autonomous vehicles  finite space

4. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Motivation

5. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Control system N sensors  N degrees of freedom  Ternary value for each sensor Good Bad Neutral Values are set based on environment Movement  Good direction  Neutral direction  Does not move

6. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Deadlocked agents

7. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Synthetic Social Structures Dominance  Give each agent a dominance level  Dominant agents ignore those with lower levels Avoidance percentage  Avoid agents a certain percentage of time  Low avoidance implies high dominance

8. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control SSS tests Twenty runs of each Record when the agents pass through doorway Dominance  One different  Five groups of ten  All different Avoidance percentage  All avoid 90% of the time  All avoid 50% of the time  All have different dominance from 0.02 to 1.0

9. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control SSS results (Dominance) One different Five groups of ten All different No social interactions

10. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control SSS results (Avoid. perc.) Avoid 90% Avoid 50% All different No social interactions

11. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Coordinated behavior

12. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Discussion Added simple social interactions between autonomous vehicles  Communication overhead small  Robust to failure… One goes down, others should be OK Tested on simple problem  Definite difference in overall behavior

13. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Future work Finding dominance groups  Use an Evolutionary Algorithm to find groupings  Groupings that generalize well to any environment Dynamic dominance hierarchy  Adaptability  Distance to goal  More robust than static method? Extend to more complex problem domains

14. 2006 IEEE International Conference On Networking, Sensing and Control Questions?