How Behavior Trees generalize the Teleo-Reactive paradigm and And-Or-Trees

Abstract

Behavior Trees (BTs) is a way of organizing the switching structure of a control system, that was originally developed in the computer gaming industry but is now also being used in robotics. The Teleo-Reactive programs (TRs) is a highly cited reactive hierarchical robot control approach suggested by Nilsson and And-Or-Trees are trees used for heuristic problems solving. In this paper, we show that BTs generalize TRs as well as And-Or-Trees, even though the two concepts are quite different. And-Or-Trees are trees of conditions, and we show that they transform into a feedback execution plan when written as a BT. TRs are hierarchical control structures, and we show how every TR can be written as a BT. Furthermore, we show that so-called Universal TRs, guaranteeing that the goal will be reached, are a special case of so-called Finite Time Successful BTs. This implies that many designs and theoretical results developed for TRs can be applied to BTs.