On the Implementation of Behavior Trees in Robotics
This work provides guidance for robotics practitioners adopting BTs, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing solutions without introducing new methods.
The paper addresses the practical implementation challenges of Behavior Trees (BTs) in robotics, outlining community-developed solutions and demonstrating their integration into robotic software architectures with a use case example.
There is a growing interest in Behavior Trees (BTs) as a tool to describe and implement robot behaviors. BTs were devised in the video game industry and their adoption in robotics resulted in the development of ad-hoc libraries to design and execute BTs that fit complex robotics software architectures. While there is broad consensus on how BTs work, some characteristics rely on the implementation choices done in the specific software library used. In this letter, we outline practical aspects in the adoption of BTs and the solutions devised by the robotics community to fully exploit the advantages of BTs in real robots. We also overview the solutions proposed in open-source libraries used in robotics, we show how BTs fit in robotic software architecture, and we present a use case example.