Title

Intelligent Agents As Teammates

Abstract

Team behavior has almost exclusively been studied as involving humans interacting in tasks that require collective action to achieve success. Long a feature in science fiction, it recently has become technologically possible to create artificial entities that can serve as members of teams, as opposed to simply being automated systems operated by human team members. In the computing and robotics literature, such entities are called software agents. The term embodied agent is often used to describe physical robots in order to differentiate them from purely software agents; however, for the purposes of this chapter, we will use agent to refer to both because we intend to argue that some form of embodiment, virtual or physical, is an important element in establishing and maintaining membership in a team. The term intelligent agent is probably overly generous for describing the cognitive performance possible within the next decade, but implicit in the proposed elevation of status to teammate is the assumption that agents are capable of serving a role within the team that would otherwise have to be served by a human. This does not imply that human-level cognitive capability is feasible, required, or even desired, only that serving as a team member implies a different kind of interaction and collaboration with human team members than is expected of other forms of automation. If the agent must exhaustively consider interactions between its actions and the past and future actions of all other team members, achieving good teamwork becomes a computationally intensive problem. For the purpose of this survey, we limit our discussion of agents to pieces of software that (a) are autonomous, defined as capable of functioning independently for a significant length of time, (b) proactively act in anticipation of future events, and (c) are capable of self-reflection about their and their teammates’ abilities. In this chapter, we will review research on multiagent systems, mixed initiative control, and agent interaction within human teams to evaluate the technological outlook, potential, and research directions for developing agents to serve as genuine team members.

Publication Date

1-1-2013

Publication Title

Theories of Team Cognition: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Number of Pages

313-344

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203813140-25

Socpus ID

85076303833 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85076303833

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