[ros-users] Looking for a behavior handling executive

[Jack O'Quin]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:24 PM, Alex Brown <rbirac at cox.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>     We are transitioning our Windows based robot project (leafproject.org)
> over to ROS.  (Thank you, Willow Garage :- )  As hobbyists, we do not want
> to be limited to single purpose designs, but want robots that can perform
> many complex behaviors selected either by user voice commands or
> autonomously generated behaviors from an artificial personality.
>
>     We currently use a table driven state machine to initialize and execute
> each behavior.  This can involve turning sensors and analysis programs on or
> off and sequentially (with branching) calling many lower level behaviors to
> accomplish the higher level objectives.  Each higher level behavior has its
> table in a text file.  The current implementation has some limitations that
> I would like to address in rewriting the code for ROS.
>
>     I suspect that some other projects have similar capabilities.  I would
> like to look at their implementations but searching all the repositories or
> the multi-thousand item package list is too daunting.  I would appreciate it
> if someone would point me at some existing packages that perform this type
> of function.

I have not used it yet, because we too already have hand-coded state
machines. But, for a reimplementation, SMACH looks very nice to me:

 http://www.ros.org/wiki/smach
-- 
 joq