Convergence Analysis of Hybrid Control Systems in the Form of Backward Chained Behavior Trees

Abstract

A robot control system is often composed of a set of low level continuous controllers and a switching policy that decides which of those continuous controllers to apply at each time instant. The switching policy can be either a Finite State Machine (FSM), a Behavior Tree (BT) or some other structure. In previous work we have shown how to create BTs using a backward chained approach that results in a reactive goal directed policy. This policy can be thought of as providing disturbance rejection at the task level in the sense that if a disturbance changes the state in such a way that the currently running continuous controller cannot handle it, the policy will switch to the appropriate continuous controller. In this letter we show how to provide convergence guarantees for such policies.