Activity Recognition for Agent Teams

Abstract

Proficient teams can accomplish goals that would not otherwise be achievable by groups of uncoordinated individuals. This thesis addresses the problem of analyzing team activities from external observations and prior knowledge of the team’s behavior patterns. There are three general classes of recognition cues that are potentially valuable for team activity/plan recognition: (1) spatial relationships between team members and/or physical landmarks that stay fixed over a period of time; (2) temporal dependencies between behaviors in a plan or between actions in a behavior; (3) coordination constraints between agents and the actions that they are performing. This thesis examines how to leverage available spatial, temporal, and coordination cues to perform offline multi-agent activity/plan recognition for teams with dynamic membership. In physical domains (military, athletic, or robotic), team behaviors often have an observable spatio-temporal structure, defined by the relative physical positions of team members and their relation to static landmarks. We suggest