Behavior Trees in Industrial Applications: A Case Study in Underground Explosive Charging
2024 (English)In: 2024 IEEE 20th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, CASE 2024, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2024, p. 156-162Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
In industrial applications Finite State Machines (FSMs) are often used to implement decision making policies for autonomous systems. In recent years, the use of Behavior Trees (BT) as an alternative policy representation has gained considerable attention. The benefits of using BTs over FSMs are modularity and reusability, enabling a system that is easy to extend and modify. However, there exists few published studies on successful implementations of BTs for industrial applications. This paper contributes with the lessons learned from implementing BTs in a complex industrial use case, where a robotic system assembles explosive charges and places them in holes on the rock face. The main result of the paper is that even if it is possible to model the entire system as a BT, combining BTs with FSMs can increase the readability and maintainability of the system. The benefit of such combination is remarked especially in the use case studied in this paper, where the full system cannot run autonomously but human supervision and feedback are needed.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2024. p. 156-162
Keywords [en]
behavior Trees, Behavior Trees in Robotics Applications, Finite State Machines, Modularity
National Category
Robotics and automation
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-367272DOI: 10.1109/CASE59546.2024.10711822ISI: 001361783100023Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85206356835OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-367272DiVA, id: diva2:1984776
Conference
20th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, CASE 2024, Bari, Italy, Aug 28 2024 - Sep 1 2024
Note
Part of ISBN 9798350358513
QC 20250717
2025-07-172025-07-172025-07-17Bibliographically approved