On the evaluation of agent behaviors Original Research Article

This work focuses on robot behaviors which use minimal communication and rely mostly on changes in the environment as their cue for action. The behavior-based paradigm for building autonomous robots has become very popular because of its successes, use of the world as an external memory and replacement of classical planning by agent-environment dynamics. However there are no criteria for evaluating and improving behavior sets. Our aim here is to bridge this gap. We define several criteria (power, usefulness, flexibility, modularity, and, reliability) and investigate the properties of behavior sets using them. We use these criteria to present results on modifications to individual behaviors and addition of new behaviors to the behavior sets. We show how computations related to these criteria can be carried out. We report on guidelines to improve a behavior set.