Robots are agents, too!

ABSTRACT

Recent years are seeing dramatically growing interest in robots, side-by-side, paradoxically, with a worrisome decline in robotics work within the autonomous agent community. This, despite the significant opportunities enabled by viewing robots as agents. In this talk, I will argue for such an inclusive view, by examining multi-robot teams. From an agent perspective, challenges in building such teams are many: Some are related to a particular task (taskwork), and some are related to the interactions between agents (teamwork).

For close to 15 years, researchers in agents have provided a growing body of evidence that taskwork and teamwork are separable, and have repeatedly demonstrated the benefits of such separation. I will survey my group's role in investigating this hypothesis with physical robots, the lessons learned, and the challenges and opportunities provided by viewing robots as agents, too.