Research Projects

Teams succeed because of the network of relationships they possess, and the emergent behaviors this network facilitates. These emergent behaviors arise due to three constructs: (a) multiple agents in the team capable of taking actions, (b) interactions between the agents, and (c) emergence of global-scale patterns due to the interactions. The overall research strategy and objective tackles each of these constructs as separate tasks in the context of a search and rescue mission. Search and rescue operations are often severely resource constrained in terms of time, energy, and information organization. Operating in such resource-constrained scenarios can impact the ability of human-agent teams to tackle complex problems, resulting in sub-optimal outputs. In this project, we have been studying this problem from three aspects: how team network structures affect performance in search and rescue, how multiple agents can learn together, and how humans trust the search-and-rescue agents. Our work has shown that resource-constrained teams prefer structures that are more self-oriented. Similarly, we found that specific network structures can guide learning agents to more prosocial behaviors.