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Teams of robots tasked with making critical decisions in competitive environments are at risk for being shepherded or misdirected to a location that is advantageous for a competing team. Our lab is working to understand how adversarial teams of robots can successfully move their competition to desired locations in part so that we can then devise practices to counter these strategies and help make team functioning more successful and secure. In this paper, preliminary research is presented that studies how a team of robots can be shepherded or misdirected to a disadvantageous location. We draw inspiration from herding practices as well as deceptive practices seen in higher-order primates and humans. We define behaviors for the target (mark) agents to be moved as well as members of the shepherding team (a pushing agent and pulling shills) and present simulation results showing how these behaviors move robots to a desired location. These behaviors were implemented and trialed on hardware platform. A discussion of ongoing research into understanding misdirection in multi-robot teams concludes this paper.
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This content will become publicly available on August 1, 2026
A Game-Theoretic Research Platform for Team-based Design Decisions under Competition
Design decision-making under competition is a critical challenge in real-world engineering design. These challenges are compounded by bounded rationality, where cognitive limitations and imperfect information influence decision-making strategies. To address these issues, we develop a game-theoretic research platform to investigate team-based design under competition. This platform abstracts and simulates real-world competitive design scenarios through controlled experiments. It features a user-friendly interface to collect behavioral data, which supports the analysis of team and individual strategies. Additionally, we validated the platform through a pilot study, demonstrating its ability to capture realistic design features and generate meaningful insights into competitive design behaviors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2419423
- PAR ID:
- 10636307
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cambridge University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Design Society
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- ICED25
- ISSN:
- 2732-527X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 101 to 110
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- decision making design engineering human behavior in design
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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