Heterogeneous Robot Teams can provide a wide range of capabilities and therefore significant benefits when handling a mission. However, they also require new approaches to capability and mission definition that are not only suitable to handle heterogeneous capabilities but furthermore allow a combination or distribution of them with a coherent representation that is not limiting the individual robot. Behavior Trees offer many of the required properties, are growing in popularity for robot control and have been proposed for multirobot coordination, but always as separate behavior tree, defined in advance and without consideration for a changing team. In this paper, we propose a new behavior tree approach that is capable to handle complex real world robotic missions and is geared towards a distributed execution by providing built in functionalities for cost calculation, subtree distribution and data wiring. We present a formal definition, its open source implementation as ros_bt_py library and experimental verification of its capabilities.

翻译：异构机器人团队在执行任务时能够提供广泛的能力，因而具有显著优势。然而，这也要求采用新的能力和任务定义方法，这些方法不仅需适用于异构能力的处理，还应允许以连贯的表示方式对其进行组合或分布，且不限制单个机器人的性能。行为树具备许多所需特性，在机器人控制领域日益流行，并已被提出用于多机器人协调，但始终是作为预定义的独立行为树，未考虑团队的变化性。本文提出一种新型行为树方法，能够处理复杂的现实世界机器人任务，并通过内置的成本计算、子树分布和数据连接功能，面向分布式执行进行设计。我们给出了形式化定义，其开源实现库 ros_bt_py，并通过实验验证了其能力。