Real-time autonomous distributed cooperation under dynamically changing environments

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We investigated on real-time multi-agent systems in which a number of autonomous agents that can share only incomplete information about their dynamically changing environment but have to achieve their objective collectively by cooperating with each other in real time. We chose as the research test-beds RoboCup soccer and RoboCupRescue because these are best suited for research on logical and software aspects of real-time distributed cooperative systems.The most remarkable point of our research results is that developed agents manage to solve these complicated real-time distributedcooperation problems in humanlike ways as far as possible. For example, our soccer agents use only humanlike short shouts for their communication to make tactical team play. In spite of this limitation, our agent teams won all official competitions in Japan held in this term.We also developed effective visual debugging environments for agent development. Such agent development is, from the programming viewpoint, nothing other than concurrent programming effort, which is most difficult to test and debug because there will be no same situations repeated with the existence of other offending opponents.