A Behavior Way or (BT) is a way to structure the switching between
tasks of an artificial or autonomous agent such as a robot or non-player entity like a robot in a computer game.
Traditional design methods generally produce brittle behaviors as
complexity increases and as such, it becomes hard to add features
without breaking the existing functionality of the system.
Behavioral Trees were designed to solve this problem. Behavioral Trees are an efficient way of creating modular and reactive systems.
Behavioral Trees in Robotics and AI: The Introduction provides an in-depth exploration of the topic. It is the first comprehensive book on the use of Behavioral Trees.
The book introduces the subject with simple topics, like the design
principles to complex topics (task planning & learning). It starts with an introduction to behavioral trees. The introduction is followed by a brief description of how BTs generalize early switching structures.
These ideas are used as a foundation of a set of efficient design
principles. The book then presents a set of extensions, offers tools on how to analyze these extensions.
With the new analysis tools, the book then describes how the behavioral trees generalize the earlier approaches. It shows how BTs can be automatically generated using planning and learning.
The final part of the book offers a set of tools to capture the behavior of Stochastic BTs, where the probable outcome is expressed in percentage. With these tools, you can compute the success probabilities as well as the time is taken for accomplishing tasks.
This book targets audiences, including students and professionals
interested in modeling complex behaviors for game characters, robots, and other autonomous agents. Readers can choose at what pace they want to learn the subject of BTs, based on their requirements & backgrounds.