Audience: Teammates joining the agent layer + judges evaluating the agent design. Read top-to-bottom — each section drills one level deeper.

1. The 30-Second Pitch

SENTINEL is the AI brain of the Rescue Swarm. It runs as a separate Python process that talks to the backend through MCP (tools) and HTTP (read-only state) to control 5 rescue drones.

Instead of one giant LLM making every decision, SENTINEL uses a multi-agent blackboard architecture:

• 1 Commander — strategic LLM. Sets priorities and posture for the whole swarm.
• 5 Pilots — tactical LLM, one per drone. Each picks its own zone when its drone goes idle.
• 1 Blackboard — lock-protected shared state that decouples them.

When the LLM is unavailable or a decision is trivial, everything falls back to a deterministic rule-based planner (WeightedPlanner) so the swarm never stalls.

2. Agent Design Highlights (for the Pitch)

These are the six design choices worth emphasising to judges. Each one is backed by concrete code in the repo.

2.1 Hierarchical multi-agent (Commander + Pilots)

• What it is: two-tier cognitive split — one strategic LLM, five tactical LLMs.
• Why it's good: each agent stays in its own scope of context. Commander sees the whole map, Pilots see only their own drone's options. This keeps prompts short (cheaper, faster, more reliable) and makes the decisions interpretable.
• What to say on stage: "We don't ask one LLM to do everything — we give the Commander the map and give each Pilot a menu. That's why our agent stays coherent with 5 drones acting in parallel."

2.2 Blackboard coordination pattern

• What it is: a classic AI architecture — specialist agents do not talk to each other directly, they read and write a shared Blackboard object (priority_map, posture, urgent_redirect, zone_claims).
• Why it's good: Commander and Pilots are completely decoupled. Either can fail, be replaced, or be scaled out, and the rest of the system keeps working. It's also how real cognitive architectures (HEARSAY-II, CAST) solve distributed reasoning.
• What to say on stage: "We chose a blackboard pattern over direct messaging. The Commander doesn't know which Pilot will read its brief — and that's the point."