A Behavior Tree-inspired programming language for autonomous agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Biggar, Oliver, Shames, Iman
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Biggar, Oliver
Shames, Iman
author_facet Biggar, Oliver
Shames, Iman
contents We propose a design for a functional programming language for autonomous agents, built off the ideas and motivations of Behavior Trees (BTs). BTs are a popular model for designing agents behavior in robotics and AI. However, as their growth has increased dramatically, the simple model of BTs has come to be limiting. There is a growing push to increase the functionality of BTs, with the end goal of BTs evolving into a programming language in their own right, centred around the defining BT properties of modularity and reactiveness. In this paper, we examine how the BT model must be extended in order to grow into such a language. We identify some fundamental problems which must be solved: implementing `reactive' selection, 'monitoring' safety-critical conditions, and passing data between actions. We provide a variety of small examples which demonstrate that these problems are complex, and that current BT approaches do not handle them in a manner consistent with modularity. We instead provide a simple set of modular programming primitives for handling these use cases, and show how they can be combined to build complex programs. We present a full specification for our BT-inspired language, and give an implementation in the functional programming language Haskell. Finally, we demonstrate our language by translating a large and complex BT into a simple, unambiguous program.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08654
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Behavior Tree-inspired programming language for autonomous agents
Biggar, Oliver
Shames, Iman
Programming Languages
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Software Engineering
We propose a design for a functional programming language for autonomous agents, built off the ideas and motivations of Behavior Trees (BTs). BTs are a popular model for designing agents behavior in robotics and AI. However, as their growth has increased dramatically, the simple model of BTs has come to be limiting. There is a growing push to increase the functionality of BTs, with the end goal of BTs evolving into a programming language in their own right, centred around the defining BT properties of modularity and reactiveness. In this paper, we examine how the BT model must be extended in order to grow into such a language. We identify some fundamental problems which must be solved: implementing `reactive' selection, 'monitoring' safety-critical conditions, and passing data between actions. We provide a variety of small examples which demonstrate that these problems are complex, and that current BT approaches do not handle them in a manner consistent with modularity. We instead provide a simple set of modular programming primitives for handling these use cases, and show how they can be combined to build complex programs. We present a full specification for our BT-inspired language, and give an implementation in the functional programming language Haskell. Finally, we demonstrate our language by translating a large and complex BT into a simple, unambiguous program.
title A Behavior Tree-inspired programming language for autonomous agents
topic Programming Languages
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08654