CABTO: Context-Aware Behavior Tree Grounding for Robot Manipulation
This addresses the challenge of reducing expert dependency in robot manipulation for robotics researchers and engineers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing BT planning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automating the construction of complete and consistent behavior tree systems for robot manipulation, which typically requires manual expert effort, and introduces CABTO, a framework that efficiently solves this by leveraging large models and contextual feedback, achieving effectiveness across seven task sets in three scenarios.
Behavior Trees (BTs) offer a powerful paradigm for designing modular and reactive robot controllers. BT planning, an emerging field, provides theoretical guarantees for the automated generation of reliable BTs. However, BT planning typically assumes that a well-designed BT system is already grounded -- comprising high-level action models and low-level control policies -- which often requires extensive expert knowledge and manual effort. In this paper, we formalize the BT Grounding problem: the automated construction of a complete and consistent BT system. We analyze its complexity and introduce CABTO (Context-Aware Behavior Tree grOunding), the first framework to efficiently solve this challenge. CABTO leverages pre-trained Large Models (LMs) to heuristically search the space of action models and control policies, guided by contextual feedback from BT planners and environmental observations. Experiments spanning seven task sets across three distinct robotic manipulation scenarios demonstrate CABTO's effectiveness and efficiency in generating complete and consistent behavior tree systems.