The First International Maritime Capture the Flag Competition: Lessons Learned and Future Directions
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Authors
Dasgupta, Prithviraj
Novitzky, Michael
Beason, Jordan
Errico, Tyler
Leprell, Matthew
Issue Date
2025-02-25
Type
Article
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Abstract
Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) is a 3-vs-3 multi-agent real-time strategy game that utilizes a marine robotics simulator with support for hardware deployment. The game presents several research challenges in the areas of coordination and communication of multi-agent teams in adversarial environments with sparse rewards, and safe autonomy. In this paper, we report our experiences and challenges in deploying the MCTF game as an open, public challenge as part of the competition track at the 2024 Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS) conference. The top performing teams were also evaluated on unmanned surface vehicles playing a 3-vs-3 MCTF game in a physical marine environment. We summarize the techniques used by the top eight competition entries that featured control algorithms ranging from multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to heuristic approaches for path planning and search algorithms. Our analysis of the competition results reveals a trade off between winning versus safety, as a key factor differentiating teams' performance was their agents' handling of safety behaviors like collisions with other players. We conclude by highlighting the key research gaps in deploying multi-player game-like encounters in the real world scenarios.
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Publisher
AAAI