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Welcome to the online home of the Center for Agent-Soldier Teaming (CAST), a new element of the Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL). Headquartered in Maryland and distributed throughout the United States, DEVCOM ARL is the corporate laboratory of the US Army. Our mission is to discover, innovate, and transition science and technology to ensure dominant strategic land power.
The CAST vision ...
CAST will build a collaborative nexus for basic and applied research that will generate new theories, methods, and technologies to enable heterogeneous groups of humans and intelligent agents to team as robustly as units of highly trained Soldiers do today. Using a combination of physical and virtual spaces, the CAST is designed to co-locate and integrate highly invested and engaged researchers, novice and expert alike, from across the spectrum of science and engineering related to human autonomous agent teaming.
As the CAST is in its infancy, this website has been constructed to promote a high-level vision for how we intend to spur the already-occurring revolution in human relationships with intelligent agents. We see ourselves as peers, and eventually partners, of those who have already realized the critical need to develop new ways of interaction – moving from “agent as tool” to “agent as collaborative partner.” While we have made progress in understanding how to build and optimize teams that are composed only of similar entities, such as entire teams of Soldiers or entire teams of a single class of intelligent agents, there is still much that remains to be discovered. An even bigger challenge, given our limited (but growing!) knowledge base, is how to systematically and purposefully build and optimize dynamic teams of heterogeneous mixtures of humans and agents.
This is our invitation to you: come explore our vision and then help us to make it better! Come back regularly to these pages, they will be updated as the CAST evolves. Engage with us when the time is right, as we believe that the most critical need in building towards our vision is deep collaboration among a truly diverse set of experts from government, industry and academia.
For some more in-depth reading on our current understanding of the science needed to address our goals, visit and provide feedback on our interactive paper at the IEEEbrain online forum: https://brain.ieee.org/brain-storm/enhancing-human-agent-teaming/
