The Maine Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving Research Group is part of the Maine Software Agents and AI Laboratory, which is part of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Maine.  Our research focuses on developing ways of getting groups of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems to cooperatively accomplish tasks.  We have ongoing research projects in self-organization/reorganization and task assignment (both part of the  CoDA Project, which used to be called the MAUV Project), intelligent control of autonomous systems (the  Orca project), deciding what to say during collaborative problem solving (part of the  CoCo project), and developing a low-bandwidth conceptual language for CDPS systems (the  COLA project).  We collaborate with several other laboratories, including researchers at the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI), the Naval Postgraduate School ( NPS), and the UM Spatial Engineering Department.

Our primary domain is cooperative problem solving by groups of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Aside from an interesting and challenging domain in which to develop and test CDPS methods, AUVs in general and cooperative systems of AUVs in particular have immense potential for science and industry as well.

The CDPS group involves both undergraduate and graduate students in AI research. There are usually five to ten students in our group, with equal numbers of men and women.  Our students routinely go on to graduate school or to work in industry in artificial intelligence.  Several of our students, undergraduates as well as graduate students, have authored or co-authored papers.

If you're a computer science student at UMaine or plan to be and would like to be involved, get in touch! If you're considering graduate school and our projects sound interesting, consider UMaine--we offer both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. (Click here for more information.)