# Execution Semantics of Behavior Trees in Robotic Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00090/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00084/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05842/) (2020)
- [Behavior Trees in Robot Control Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13083/) (2022)
- [Behavior Trees in Action: A Study of Robotics Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06256/) (2020)
- [On the Implementation of Behavior Trees in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15227/) (2021)
- [An expressiveness hierarchy of Behavior Trees and related architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07919/) (2021)
- [Comparison between Behavior Trees and Finite State Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16137/) (2024)
- [Verifying Safety of Behaviour Trees in Event-B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14045/) (2022)
- [Formalizing the Execution Context of Behavior Trees for Runtime Verification of Deliberative Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12474/) (2021)
- [BehaVerify: Verifying Temporal Logic Specifications for Behavior Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05360/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Behavior Trees (BTs) have found a widespread adoption in robotics due to appealing features, their ease of use as a conceptual model of control policies and the availability of software tooling for BT-based design of control software. However, BTs don't have formal execution semantics and, furthermore, subtle differences among implementations can make the same model behave differently depending on the underlying software. This paper aims at defining the execution semantics of behavior trees (BTs) as used in robotics applications. To this purpose, we present an abstract data type that formalizes the structure and execution of BTs. While our formalization is inspired by existing contributions in the scientific literature and state-of-the art implementations, we strive to provide an unambiguous treatment of most features that find incomplete or inconsistent treatment across other works.