Communicating with unknown teammates

Past research has investigated a number of methods for coordinating teams of agents, but, with the growing number of sources of agents, it is likely that agents will encounter teammates that do not share their coordination methods. Therefore, it is desirable for agents to form an effective ad hoc team. This research tackles the problem of communication in ad hoc teams, introducing a minimal version of the multiagent, multi-armed bandit problem with limited communication between the agents. This abstract summarizes theoretical results that prove that this problem setting can be solved in polynomial time when the agent knows the set of possible teammates, and the empirical results that show that the problems can be solved in practice.