A principled analysis of Behavior Trees and their generalisations

Understand

As complex autonomous robotic systems become more widespread, the need for transparent and reusable Artificial Intelligence (AI) designs becomes more apparent.

• In this paper we analyse how the principles behind Behavior Trees (BTs), an increasingly popular tree-structured control architecture, are applicable to these goals.
• Using structured programming as a guide, we analyse the BT principles of reactiveness and modularity in a formal framework of action selection.
• Proceeding from these principles, we review a number of challenging use cases of BTs in the literature, and show that reasoning via these principles leads to compatible solutions.