Learning and communication in multi-agent systems

This paper discusses the significance of communication between individual agents that are embedded into learning Multi-Agent Systems. For several learning tasks occurring within a Multi-Agent System, communication activities are investigated and the need for a mutual understanding of agents participating in the learning process is made explicit. Thus, the need for a common ontology to exchange learning-related information is shown. Building this ontology is all additional learning task that is not only extremely important, but also extremely difficult. We propose a solution that is motivated by the human ability to understand each other even in the absence of a common language by using alternative communication channels, such as gestures. We show some results for the task of cooperative material handling by several manipulators.