Design and Evaluation of an Assisted Programming Interface for Behavior Trees in Robotics

TL;DR

This paper presents BETR-GUI, an interactive tool that combines AI techniques and a drag-and-drop interface to help users create and validate Behavior Trees for robotics more efficiently, demonstrated through a user study.

Contribution

Introduction of BETR-GUI, a novel GUI integrating AI methods for assisted Behavior Tree creation and validation in robotics programming.

Findings

Users perform better with combined assistive methods.

Full BETR-GUI outperforms standalone AI assistant.

Participants found the tool effective for robot programming.

Abstract

The possibility to create reactive robot programs faster without the need for extensively trained programmers is becoming increasingly important. So far, it has not been explored how various techniques for creating Behavior Tree (BT) program representations could be combined with complete graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to allow a human user to validate and edit trees suggested by automated methods. In this paper, we introduce BEhavior TRee GUI (BETR-GUI) for creating BTs with the help of an AI assistant that combines methods using large language models, planning, genetic programming, and Bayesian optimization with a drag-and-drop editor. A user study with 60 participants shows that by combining different assistive methods, BETR-GUI enables users to perform better at solving the robot programming tasks. The results also show that humans using the full variant of BETR-GUI perform better than the AI assistant running on its own.