Extending Behavior Trees for Robotic Missions with Quality Requirements
Paper in proceeding, 2025

Context and motivation: In recent years, behavior trees have gained growing interest within the robotics community as a specification and control-switching mechanism for the different tasks that form a robotics mission. Problem: Given the rising complexity and prevalence of robotic systems, it is increasingly challenging and important for practitioners to design high-quality missions that meet certain qualities, for instance, to consider potential failures or mitigate safety risks. In software requirements engineering, quality or non-functional requirements have long been recognized as a key factor in system success. Currently, qualities are not represented in behavior-tree models, which capture a robotic mission, making it difficult to assess the extent to which different mission components comply with those qualities. Principal ideas/results: In this paper, we propose an extension for behavior trees to have qualities and quality requirements explicitly represented in robotics missions. We provide a meta-model for the extension, develop a domain-specific language (DSL), and describe how we integrated our DSL in one of the most used languages in robotics for developing behavior trees, BehaviorTree.CPP. A preliminary evaluation of the implemented DSL shows promising results for the feasibility of our approach and the need for similar DSLs. Contribution: Our approach paves the way for incorporating qualities into the behavior model of robotics missions. This promotes early expression of qualities in robotics missions, and a better overview of missions’ components and their contribution to the satisfaction of quality concerns.

robotics

quality attribute

non-functional requirements

behavior trees

behavior model

quality concerns

Author

Razan Ghzouli

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Interaction Design and Software Engineering

University of Gothenburg

Rebekka Wohlrab

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Interaction Design and Software Engineering

University of Gothenburg

Jennifer Horkoff

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Interaction Design and Software Engineering

University of Gothenburg

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)

0302-9743 (ISSN) 1611-3349 (eISSN)

Vol. 15588 333-349
978-3-031-88531-0 (ISBN)

Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ)
Barcelona, Spain,

Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1007/978-3-031-88531-0_24

More information

Latest update

4/4/2025 8