[agents] Final CfP: Second Maritime Capture the Flag Competition at AAMAS 2025

[Dasgupta, Prithviraj CIV USN NRL WASHINGTON DC (USA)]

FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) Competition - online and AAMAS 2025

The 2nd Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) Competition is well underway. With just about a month left for submitting entries for the qualifying rounds, the competition is heating up!

TL; DR: Program a team of three agents via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) or other techniques to play a Capture-the-Flag game, first in simulation and then on physical robots in a marine environment.

Game rules, tutorials and submission instructions at: https://mctf2025.com.

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Competition Problem
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Capture the Flag is a commonly played team-game involving two opposing teams. Each team's objective is to capture the opponent's flag, while preventing the opponent from capturing the team's flag. We consider a Maritime Capture-the-Flag (MCTF) game where the players are autonomous marine vehicles. The objective of the MCTF competition is to program three agents that can play the MCTF game as a team against a 3-player opponent team, while maximizing their team's score, within a real-time simulation of a maritime game environment. Top performing entries from simulation will be deployed on autonomous surface vehicles to play the game in a physical maritime environment while competing against each other.

To help participants familiarize with the programming, we have included a brief tutorial and sample code written in Python and RLlib for training and evaluating a team of three agents to play a 3-v-3 MCTF game on the competition Website.

Evaluation: During the qualifying round, each submitted competition entry will be automatically evaluated in simulation against the top-10 (or less) teams on the current leaderboard, immediately after submission. The leaderboard will be updated to reflect the score-based ranking of teams. At the end of the qualifying round period, the top 10 scoring teams in simulation will move on to the hardware competition phase. Each qualifying entry will be evaluated on autonomous surface vehicles playing a 3-v-3 MCTF game against each of the other qualifying entries, within a physical marine MCTF environment at West Point, NY. Competition winners will be announced at the MCTF competition meeting at AAMAS. Details of the scoring rules and leaderboard ranking are available on the competition Website.

Participation/Attendance requirements: For competition finalists, we expect at least one team member to attend (either in-person or virtually) and present their work at the competition meeting at AAMAS on May 20.

Questions: Check out the MCTF Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section at https://mctf2025.com/faq.

POC email: john.kliem3.civ at us.navy.mil<mailto:john.kliem3.civ at us.navy.mil>

Timeline:
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Qualifying Rounds (online): February 24 - May 4, 2025
Final Submissions Due (online): May 4, 2025
Hardware competitions (West Point, NY): May 5-16, 2025 **Public Attendance Not Available
Winner Announcements and half-day meeting (at AAMAS 2025 in Detroit, MI, USA): May 20, 2025.

Organizers:
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John Kliem, Naval Research Laboratory, USA (main POC)
Prithviraj (Raj) Dasgupta, Naval Research Laboratory, USA
Michael (Misha) Novitzky, U. S. Military Academy, West Point, USA
Michael Benjamin, MIT
Zachary Serlin, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Edward Pottrill, Defence Science & Technology Lab (DSTL), UK
David Hubczenko, Defence Science & Technology Group (DSTG), Australia
Jordan Beason, U. S. Military Academy, West Point, USA

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