Resources

Behavior-Based Programming

• Presentation by Daniel Ozick on Friday, January 14, 2011. This was an initial talk providing some background and introducing the concepts of behavior-based programming. There were also previews of the software library we'll use for this IAP. Note that the slides in this presentation do not represent the final library API.

Papers

• A robust layered control system for a mobile robot by Rodney Brooks. Among other things, Rod Brooks was a professor at MIT, a founder of iRobot, and is currently the founder and CTO of Heartland Robotics. I believe this is the paper that started it all.
• A robot that walks; emergent behaviors from a carefully evolved network by Rodney Brooks.
• New approaches to robotics by Rodney Brooks.
• Stupid robot tricks: A behavior-based distributed algorithm library for programming swarms of robots by James D. McLurkin.

Books

• Robot Programming : A Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics by Joe Jones and Daniel Roth. Joe Jones was co-inventor or iRobot's Roomba vacuuming robot. This is Joe's second book, and you'll pretty much learn everything you need to build the kinds of behaviors that Roomba uses. There's also a robot simulator you can run on your PC.
  • Mobile Robots: Inspiration to Implementation by Joseph L. Jones, Anita M. Flynn, and Bruce A. Seiger. This is Joe's earlier book. It explains behavior-based software in a chapter or two, but also has lots of information that you need to know about the hardware to build simple robots.
  • Behavior-Based Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents) by Ronald C. Arkin. If you want a more thorough academic treatment of the subject, this is a good place to start, with several alternative approaches explored.