An ad hoc team setting is one in which teammates must work together to obtain a common goal, but without any prior agreement regarding how to work together. In this work we introduce a role-based approach for ad hoc teamwork, in which each teammate is inferred to be following a specialized role that accomplishes a specific task or exhibits a particular behavior. In such cases, the role an ad hoc agent should select depends both on its own capabilities and on the roles currently selected by other team members. We present methods for evaluating the influence of the ad hoc agent’s role selection on the team’s utility and we examine empirically how to choose the best suited method for role assignment in a complex environment. Finally, we show that an appropriate assignment method can be determined from a limited amount of data and used successfully in new tasks that the team has not encountered before.

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In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012), June 2012.

@inproceedings{AAMAS12-katie, title={Role Selection in Ad Hoc Teamwork}, author={Katie Genter and Noa Agmon and Peter Stone}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012)}, month={June}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab/?AAMAS12-katie", year={2012} }