Adaptive manipulation using behavior trees

Conference item

Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive, dynamics-dependent tasks such as tightening a valve. To perform these tasks safely and reliably, robots must be able to quickly adapt in response to unexpected changes during task execution, and should also learn from past experience to better inform future decisions. Humans can intuitively respond and adapt their manipulation strategy to suit such problems, but representing and implementing such behaviors for robots remains a challenge. In this work we show how this can be achieved within the framework of behavior trees. We present the adaptive behavior tree, a scalable and generalizable behavior tree design that enables a robot to quickly adapt to and learn from both visual and non-visual observations during task execution, preempting task failure or switching to a different manipulation strategy. The adaptive behavior tree selects the manipulation strategy that is predicted to optimize task performance, and learns from past experience to improve these predictions for future attempts. We test our approach on a variety of tasks commonly found in industry; the adaptive behavior tree demonstrates safety, robustness (100% success rate) and efficiency in task completion (up to 36% task speedup from the baseline).

Authors: Cloete, J; Merkt, W; Havoutis, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IEEE
• Host title: 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
• Pages: 19031-19038
• Publication date: 2025-10-25
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-19
• Event title: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025)
• Event location: Hangzhou, China
• Event website: https://www.iros25.org/
• Event start date: 2025-10-19
• Event end date: 2025-10-25
• DOI: 10.1109/iros60139.2025.11245892
• EISBN: 9798331543938
• ISBN: 9798331543945
• Language: English
• Keywords: behavioral and social science; industries; visualization; adaptive systems; trees (botanical); switches; valves; robustness; safety; intelligent robots