There is growing commercial interest in the use of multiagent systems in real world applications. Some examples include inventory management in warehouses, smart homes, planetary exploration, search and rescue, air-traffic management and autonomous transportation systems. However, multiagent coordination is an extremely challenging problem. First, information relevant for coordination is often...
Multi-robot teams offer promising solutions for many long term deployments in remote and dangerous domains, such as extraterrestrial or underseas exploration. However, long term deployments present many problems preventing robot teams from operating effectively. Learning over long time scales is makes it difficult to assign credit to robots' actions, as...
The use of autonomous robots in complex exploration tasks is rapidly increasing. Indeed, robots can provide speed and cost effectiveness in many tasks, as well as allow operation in environments that are hostile to humans. In this dissertation we: 1) provide two adaptive navigation algorithms; 2) develop a coordination mechanism;...
Multiagent coordination has many real-world applications such as self-driving cars, inventory management, search and rescue, package delivery, traffic management, warehouse management, and transportation. These tasks are generally character-ized by a global team objective that is often temporally sparse - realized only upon completing an episode. The sparsity of the shared...
Tensegrity structures are composed of pure compressional elements that are connected via a network of pure tensional elements. The concept of tensegrity promises numerous advantages to the field of robotics. Tensegrity robots are, however, notoriously difficult to control due to their oscillatory nature and nonlinear interaction between the components. Multiagent...
Reinforcement learning has made impressive strides in solving problems in challenging domains, but problems are increasingly being described with sparse rewards. Sparse rewards directly reduce the rate at which useful feedback is provided to the learner and make it difficult to distinguish between what specific actions led to the reception...
Uninhabited aerial vehicles, also called UAVs are currently controller by a combination of a human pilot at a remote location, and autopilot systems similar to those found on commercial aircraft. As UAVs transition from remote piloting to fully autonomous operation, control laws must be developed for the tasks to be...
Multiagent learning offers a rich framework to address challenging real-world problems such as remote exploration and healthcare coordination, which require autonomous agents to express elaborate interactions. To be effective in such systems, agents must collectively reason about and pursue high-level, long-term, and possibly nebulous objectives while adapting their strategy to...
In this thesis, we introduce alignment-based algorithms for improving the performance of reinforcement learning solutions for problems where the reward signal cannot be collapsed into a single number. Many real world problems require an agent to balance performance, longevity, and safety, and do so across different timelines. The key to...
Autonomous multiagent teams can be used in complex exploration tasks to both expedite the exploration and improve the efficiency. However, use of multiagent systems presents additional challenges. Specifically, in domains where the agents' actions are tightly coupled, coordinating multiple agents to achieve cooperative behavior at the group level is difficult....