Learning from My Partner's Actions: Roles in Decentralized Robot Teams

Understand

When teams of robots collaborate to complete a task, communication is often necessary.

• Like humans, robot teammates should implicitly communicate through their actions: but interpreting our partner's actions is typically difficult, since a given action may have many different underlying reasons.
• Here we propose an alternate approach: instead of not being able to infer whether an action is due to exploration, exploitation, or communication, we define separate roles for each agent.
• Because each role defines a distinct reason for acting (e.g., only exploit, only communicate), teammates now correctly interpret the meaning behind their partner's actions.