A Survey of Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI

Understand

Behavior Trees (BTs) were invented as a tool to enable modular AI in computer games, but have received an increasing amount of attention in the robotics community in the last decade.

• With rising demands on agent AI complexity, game programmers found that the Finite State Machines (FSM) that they used scaled poorly and were difficult to extend, adapt and reuse.
• In BTs, the state transition logic is not dispersed across the individual states, but organized in a hierarchical tree structure, with the states as leaves.
• This has a significant effect on modularity, which in turn simplifies both synthesis and analysis by humans and algorithms alike.