International Multi-Agent Programming Contest Winners

A team from the University of Liverpool has won the annual international Multi-Agent Programming Contest this month.

The team was made up of Angela Ferrando, Fabio Papacchini and Rafael C. Cardoso who work across the ORCA, FAIR-SPACE and RAIN robotics Hubs within the Autonomy and Verification Lab at the University of Liverpool. The Contest is meant to test how multiple autonomous entities (e.g. robots) can coordinate their actions and plan to achieve the best outcome, and follows from a long line of influential competitions such as RoboCup, RoboCupRescue and RobotCup@Work.

The matches in the Multi-Agent Programming Contest consisted of achieving a number of tasks by assembling complex block patterns which required coordinated actions across many agents. The environment was dynamic and initially unknown to the agents, requiring efficient exploration techniques, online planning, and good communication between them.
