Nowadays, the state of the art in robotics reached a point when troops in military operations theatre routinely deploy unmanned robotic assets, be it unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, or unattended ground sensors supporting them in carrying our their tactical missions. Tele-operation of large numbers of such assets drastically raises costs of such operations in terms of costly and scarce expert human resources.
Tactical Agents is an ongoing cluster of U.S. Army/CERDEC-sponsored research projects aimed at development and evaluation of multi-agent coordination techniques supporting information-collection missions in tactical urban warfare. The core objective of the project cluster is development and evaluation of techniques allowing deployment of teams of autonomous assets which are capable of autonomous coordination and teamwork with the goal to carry out the high-level mission assigned to the team. In particular, we are developing agent-based coordination, planning and game-theoretic techniques for heterogeneous multi-agent teams allowing them to carry out various information collection tasks, such as reconnaissance, convoy and perimeter protection, pursuit-evasion of smart targets, surveillance, safe area traversal, etc.