Behavior Trees in Robot Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper offers a control theoretic perspective on behavior trees in robotics, emphasizing modularity, hierarchies, and feedback to manage complex robot control systems effectively.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis and practical insights into how behavior trees utilize control concepts for improved robot control system design.

Findings

Behavior trees enhance modularity and hierarchy in robot control.

Feedback mechanisms are integrated into behavior trees for robustness.

The paper bridges behavior trees with control theory for better system analysis.

Abstract

In this paper we will give a control theoretic perspective on the research area of behavior trees in robotics. The key idea underlying behavior trees is to make use of modularity, hierarchies and feedback, in order to handle the complexity of a versatile robot control system. Modularity is a well-known tool to handle software complexity by enabling development, debugging and extension of separate modules without having detailed knowledge of the entire system. A hierarchy of such modules is natural, since robot tasks can often be decomposed into a hierarchy of sub-tasks. Finally, feedback control is a fundamental tool for handling uncertainties and disturbances in any low level control system, but in order to enable feedback control on the higher level, where one module decides what submodule to execute, information regarding progress and applicability of each submodule needs to be shared in the module interfaces. We will describe how these three concepts come to use in theoretical analysis, practical design, as well as extensions and combinations with other ideas from control theory and robotics.