Designing control laws for cooperative agent teams

Control laws for cooperative agent teams utilize a combination of local and/or global knowledge to achieve the resulting group behavior. A key difficulty in this development is determining the appropriate balance between the use of global information and the use of local information to achieve coherent cooperation without excessive communication requirements. This issue is addressed by presenting some general guidelines and principles for determining the appropriate level of global versus local control. These principles are illustrated and implemented in a 'keep formation' cooperative task case study, which presents several alternative control strategies along the local versus global spectrum. Experimental data that demonstrate that local control alone is not sufficient to meet the goals of certain tasks, and that an increasing use of global knowledge can result in a steadily improving group cooperation, are presented. It is concluded that the use of local control information to ground global knowledge in the current situation is perhaps the best way to achieve the proper balance between local and global control.>