A Framework for Constrained and Adaptive Behavior-Based Agents

Abstract: Behavior Trees are commonly used to model agents for robotics and games, where constrained behaviors must be designed by human experts in order to guarantee that these agents will execute a specific chain of actions given a specific set of perceptions. In such application areas, learning is a desirable feature to provide agents with the ability to adapt and improve interactions with humans and environment, but often discarded due to its unreliability. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses Reinforcement Learning nodes as part of Behavior Trees to address the problem of adding learning capabilities in constrained agents. We show how this framework relates to Options in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, ensuring convergence of nested learning nodes, and we empirically show that the learning nodes do not affect the execution of other nodes in the tree.