Future-proof testing ensures compatibility for independently built autonomous agents

Compatibility and future-proof testing for multi-agent systems

Multiagent SystemsRobotics

Summary

When different kinds of autonomous agents, like self-driving cars made by different companies, share the same space, they need to work together safely and successfully. The authors look at a way to test these agents so they will always be compatible with others, even with new designs that come in the future. They propose using 'seed agents' as examples to test against, ensuring new agents work well with any seed-compatible agents without the need for all developers to share secret designs or coordinate directly. They explain the mathematical conditions needed and study tests that use interaction with just the seed agents to identify if an agent is future-proof.

What this means in practice

  • For autonomous vehicle developers: Develop test procedures to ensure new autonomous vehicles can safely operate with all previously certified vehicles without sharing proprietary designs.
  • For robotics system integrators: Design integration tests to verify that newly added robots will function compatibly alongside existing robots tested against common seed agents.

A theory result. No direct application yet.

Authors

Yueshan Li, Lorenzo Fiaschi, Andrea Censi, Emilio Frazzoli

Abstract

Independently developed autonomous agents, such as autonomous vehicles, must guarantee joint compatibility, such as safety and task-completion requirements, when they operate in a shared environment. Existing methods require a centrally designed specification, or interaction mechanism before any agent is deployed. However, such centralized design is unrealistic when agent designs are confidential to their developers, and it is not flexible enough to accommodate future agent designs. We study a bi-level structure in which a regulator coordinates developers by publishing seed agents, and each developer independently tests its agent to ensure that it is compatible with every seed-compatible agent, a property we call future-proofness. Under this structure, joint compatibility is guaranteed for any agents that are designed and tested independently, without any coordination with each other. In this work, we first formulate compatibility for general multi-agent systems and show why it is not trivially implied by seed-compatibility. We then characterize the future-proof agents as the closure of the seed and show that this closure is monotone in the seed. Finally, we study a class of executable tests that involve interaction with the seed alone, and we ask to what extent such tests can distinguish the future-proof agents.
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