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As complex, non-human agents become increasingly ubiquitous members of the US military war-fighting team, an effective and natural system of communications must be explored and developed to achieve human-agent collaboration across the entire team. A nonanthropomorphic communications framework does not exist that will support human-agent collaboration beyond current electronic control.This research surfaces a nonanthropomorphic framework of communications between human-human, human-agent, and agent-agent teams based on related literature review. The framework provides perspective on the potential breath of communication modalities that exist as well as the many challenges faced. Within this framework, this research uses simulation to explore the contribution to collaborative, covert military operations that non-verbal forms of communications between humans and agent team members might entail. Visual and audio cues considered include pose, motion, color, and non-speech sounds. In addition this article presents findings on contribution of these modalities to the military operation being considered as well as identifies issues for implementation, applications, implications, and areas for future research.

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The objective of the rendezvous problem is to construct a method that enables a population of agents to agree on a spatial (and possibly temporal) meeting location. We introduce the buffered gossip algorithm as a general solution to the rendezvous problem in a discrete domain with direct communication between decentralized agents. We compare the performance of the buffered gossip algorithm against the well known uniform gossip algorithm. We believe that a buffered solution is preferable to an unbuffered solution, such as the uniform gossip algorithm, because the use of a buffer allows an agent to use multiple information sources when determining its desired rendezvous point, and that access to multiple information sources may improve agent decision making by reinforcing or contradicting an initial choice. To show that the buffered gossip algorithm is an actual solution for the rendezvous problem, we construct a theoretical proof of convergence and derive the conditions under which the buffered gossip algorithm is guaranteed to produce a consensus on rendezvous location. We use these results to verify that the uniform gossip algorithm also solves the rendezvous problem. We then use a multi-agent simulation to conduct a series of simulation experiments to compare the performance between the buffered and uniform gossip algorithms. Our results suggest that the buffered gossip algorithm can solve the rendezvous problem faster than the uniform gossip algorithm; however, the relative performance between these two solutions depends on the specific constraints of the problem and the parameters of the buffered gossip algorithm.