Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction

Behavior Trees (BTs) are a way to structure the behavior of an artificial agent, enabling the creation of modular and reactive systems. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to BTs, covering topics such as semantics, design principles, learning, task planning, and extensions. It also offers tools for formally analyzing these extensions and capturing the behavior of Stochastic BTs. The book targets a broad audience, including students and professionals interested in modeling complex behaviors for robots, game characters, or other AI agents.

Format: Hardback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 19 July 2018
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Behavior Trees (BTs) are a powerful tool for structuring the behavior of artificial agents, such as robots or non-player characters in computer games. Traditional design methods, such as finite state machines, can become brittle and difficult to maintain as complexity increases, making it challenging to add new features without disrupting existing functionality. BTs were developed to address this issue, allowing for the creation of modular and reactive systems.

Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction offers a comprehensive introduction to BTs, covering simple topics such as semantics and design principles, as well as complex topics such as learning and task planning. The book provides a range of examples, from simple illustrations to realistic complex behaviors, to help readers understand how BTs can be applied in practice.

The book begins by providing an overview of BTs, explaining how they relate to earlier switching structures and control architectures. It then introduces a set of efficient and easy-to-use design principles based on these ideas. The book further extends BTs by formalizing the descriptions of how they generalize earlier approaches and demonstrating how they can be automatically generated using planning and learning.

In the final part of the book, the authors introduce tools for capturing the behavior of Stochastic BTs, where the outcomes of actions are described by probabilities. These tools enable the analysis and optimization of BTs in uncertain environments, where the uncertainty is modeled using probabilities.

Overall, Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. It provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to BTs, covering their theoretical foundations, practical applications, and extensions. The book is well-written, accessible, and filled with examples and case studies to help readers understand how BTs can be used to create intelligent and autonomous systems.

Weight: 438g
Dimension: 164 x 242 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781138593732