Hierarchical behavior organization

In most behavior-based approaches, implementing a broad set of different behavioral skills and coordinating them to achieve coherent complex behavior is an error-prone and very tedious task. Concepts for organizing reactive behavior in a hierarchical manner are rarely found in behavior-based approaches, and there is no widely accepted approach for creating such behavior hierarchies. Most applications of behavior-based concepts use only few behaviors and do not seem to scale well. Reuse of behaviors for different application scenarios or even on different robots is very rare, and the integration of behavior-based approaches with planning is unsolved. This paper discusses the design, implementation, and performance of a behavior framework that addresses some of these issues within the context of behavior-based and hybrid robot control architectures. The approach presents a step towards more systematic software engineering of behavior-based robot systems.