A cross-Hub team from Liverpool has won the annual international Multi-Agent Programming Contest (https://multiagentcontest.org/). This Contest tests how multiple autonomous entities (e.g robots) can coordinate their actions and plan to achieve the best outcome.
It follows from a long line of influential competitions such as RoboCup, RoboCupRescue, RobotCup@Work, etc.
Working together across three of the ISCF RAI Hubs, FAIR-SPACE, ORCA and RAIN, a team from the Autonomy and Verification Lab at the University of Liverpool competed against other international teams and were awarded 1st place in the Contest.
The members of the successful team are:
Rafael C. Cardoso (FAIR-SPACE, RAIN)
Angelo Ferrando (ORCA, RAIN)
Fabio Papacchini (ORCA, RAIN)
The challenge of the Multi-Agent Programming Contest was to achieve a number of tasks by assembling complex block patterns, requiring coordinated actions across many agents (i.e. robots). The environment was dynamic and initially unknown to the agents, requiring efficient exploration techniques, online planning, and good communication between them. The team with the highest score at the end of a match got awarded tournament points, and the team from the University of Liverpool achieved 1st place with 22 out of 27 points (7 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss).
This kind of challenge is a great way for researchers to pit their skills against the international programming community. Huge well done to the team at Liverpool!