Razan Ghzouli

Chalmers University of Technology, University of Gothenburg

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About

Razan Ghzouli is a researcher at the forefront of robotics software engineering, specializing in the formal modeling and analysis of autonomous robotic systems. Her work centers on the architectural coordination of robot behaviors, particularly comparing and contrasting behavior trees and state machines—two dominant paradigms for mission-level programming. Ghzouli’s most-cited paper, "Behavior Trees and State Machines in Robotics Applications" (2023, 62 citations), provides a foundational study of how these models enable robots to combine low-level skills into complex, autonomous missions. She demonstrates that while skills are often implemented at a low abstraction level, their coordination can be elegantly expressed through higher-level architectural languages. Her contributions include rigorous empirical evaluations and formal frameworks that help engineers design more reliable and scalable robotic systems. Ghzouli’s work has significant implications for the robotics community, offering clear guidance on when to use behavior trees versus state machines. Her replication package for the 2020 study further underscores her commitment to open science and reproducibility, making her a key voice in advancing the engineering of autonomous systems.