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.