Behavior-Tree-Based Person Search for Symbiotic Autonomous Mobile Robot Tasks

We consider the problem of people search by a mobile social robot in case of a situation that cannot be solved by the robot alone. Examples are physically opening a closed door or operating an elevator. Based on the Behavior Tree framework, we create a modular and easily extendable action sequence with the goal of finding a person to assist the robot. By decomposing the Behavior Tree as a Discrete Time Markov Chain, we obtain an estimate of the probability and rate of success of the options for action, especially where the robot should wait or search for people. In a real-world experiment, the presented method is compared with other common approaches in a total of 588 test runs over the course of one week, starting at two different locations in a university building. We show our method to be superior to other approaches in terms of success rate and duration until a finding person and returning to the start location.