Observant and Proactive Communication in Multi-agent Teamwork

This paper investigates effective human team cooperation and incorporated the findings into multi-agent teamwork. We describe how to give agents the same cooperative capabilities, observability and proactivity, that humans use. We show how agents can use observation of the environment and of teammates´ actions to estimate the teammates´ beliefs without generating unnecessary messages; we also show how agents can anticipate information needs among the team members and proactively communicate the information. Finally, we present two experiments that explore the effectiveness and the scalability of the use of observability and proactivity.