Automatic Modular Design of Behavior Trees for Robot Swarms with Communication Capabilites.

In this work, we develop a set of behavioral and conditional modules for the use with behavior trees. We present AutoMoDe-Cedrata, an automatic modular design method that automatically assembles and fine-tunes these modules into behavior trees that control robot swarms. We test Cedrata on three missions and, to gain further insights on its effectiveness, we design control software for the same missions using AutoMoDe-Maple, another automatic design method, and by a group of human designers. Results show that the proposed modules allow for well-performing behavior trees. Yet, Cedrata had difficulties automatically generating control software that performs similarly well as the one generated by human designers, especially when involving communication.