Behavior Control for Single and Multiple Autonomous Agents Based on Hierarchical Finite State Machines

Abstract

Complex behaviors for cooperative multi-agent applications pose a challenging task in highly dynamic environments as they are encountered in many real-world applications. Efficient methods are required for programming agent behaviors that are able to cope with necessary real-time requirements, only partial or noisy observability of the environment, and the unpredictability of dynamic environments. The goal of this work is to develop a behavior control architecture for autonomous agents in order to create complex robotic application in a comfortable and time efficient manner. Methodological extensions to an architecture based on hierachical finite state machines are presented. This results in the extended version of the behavior description architecture and language XABSL (Extensible Agent Behavior Specification Language).