In this paper we will give a control theoretic perspective on the research area of behavior trees in robotics. The key idea underlying behavior trees is to make use of modularity, hierarchies and feedback, in order to handle the complexity of a versatile robot control system. Modularity is a well-known tool to handle software complexity by enabling development, debugging and extension of separate modules without having detailed knowledge of the entire system. A hierarchy of such modules is natural, since robot tasks can often be decomposed into a hierarchy of sub-tasks. Finally, feedback control is a fundamental tool for handling uncertainties and disturbances in any low level control system, but in order to enable feedback control on the higher level, where one module decides what submodule to execute, information regarding progress and applicability of each submodule needs to be shared in the module interfaces. We will describe how these three concepts come to use in theoretical analysis, practical design, as well as extensions and combinations with other ideas from control theory and robotics.

本文将给出控制论角度下，关于机器人中行为树的研究领域。行为树的主要思想是利用模块化、层次结构和反馈控制等工具来处理机器人控制系统的复杂性，本文描述了这些概念在理论分析、实际设计及扩展方面的运用，以及与控制论和机器人学中其他思想的联合应用。

机器人控制系统中的行为树