“Hierarchy of Needs” for Robots: Control Synthesis for Compositions of Hierarchical, Complex Objectives

Drawing inspiration from Maslow's “hierarchy of needs”, this paper develops a real-time control synthesis framework for robots to address hierarchical, complex objectives, recognizing that their behaviors are inherently driven by underlying needs. Each need is encoded by the zero-superlevel set of a control barrier function (CBF), which can be time-varying, and all the needs at the same level in a hierarchy are composed into a single one through Boolean compositions of the corresponding CBFs. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a hypothetical interstellar exploration mission using laboratory robots, and novel results on nonsmooth CBF and time-varying CBF are derived.