A Toolchain to Design, Execute, and Monitor Robots Behaviors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive toolchain for designing, executing, and monitoring robot behaviors using Behavior Trees and statecharts, enabling verification and real-time monitoring within a standardized framework.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel integrated toolchain based on Behavior Trees and statecharts for robot behavior management, aligned with EU H2020 guidelines.

Findings

Validated in a simulated environment with reproducible experiments

Enables real-time monitoring and verification of robot behaviors

Supports modular and hierarchical behavior design

Abstract

In this paper, we present a toolchain to design, execute, and verify robot behaviors. The toolchain follows the guidelines defined by the EU H2020 project RobMoSys and encodes the robot deliberation as a Behavior Tree (BT), a directed tree where the internal nodes model behavior composition and leaf nodes model action or measurement operations. Such leaf nodes take the form of a statechart (SC), which runs in separate threads, whose states perform basic arithmetic operations and send commands to the robot. The toolchain provides the ability to define a runtime monitor for a given system specification that warns the user whenever a given specification is violated. We validated the toolchain in a simulated experiment that we made reproducible in an OS-virtualization environment.