Multi-agent planning with high-level human guidance

Planning and coordination of multiple agents in the presence of uncertainty and noisy sensors is extremely hard. A human operator who observes a multi-agent team can provide valuable guidance to the team based on her superior ability to interpret observations and assess the overall situation. We propose an extension of decentralized POMDPs that allows such human guidance to be factored into the planning and execution processes. Human guidance in our framework consists of intuitive high-level commands that the agents must translate into a suitable joint plan that is sensitive to what they know from local observations. The result is a framework that allows multi-agent systems to benefit from the complex strategic thinking of a human supervising them. We evaluate this approach on several common benchmark problems and show that it can lead to dramatic improvement in performance.