Learning to coordinate behaviors in soft behavior-based systems using reinforcement learning

Behavior-based systems have been successfully used in control and robotics applications. In traditional behavior-based systems, only a single behavior controls the agent in any time step. However, this behavior arbitration is not appropriate for many complex tasks. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Soft Behavior-based Architecture that uses the concept of soft suppression to coordinate flexibly between behaviors. In our method, we use reinforcement learning to find an appropriate amount of suppression for each behavior in the architecture, in addition to learn the internal mechanism of each behavior. Several experiments are provided to show the effectiveness of our method in the mobile robot navigation task.