Patience Control: A Modular and Dynamic Construction of Composite Controllers

The problem of designing controllers for achieving composite goals is well studied in the literature and is considered an open problem. In this paper we propose a controller architecture that builds on approaches for designing reactive decision making systems developed in the field of computer science. Specifically, we propose an extension of the Behavioural Programming (BP) approach that is tailored to allow controller design. As the name of the paper suggests, we identify the issue of "patience" as a key feature of the new approach - in many composite control problems it is not possible to advance all goals at all time, i.e., some goals need to "patiently" wait while others are being advanced. We demonstrate how the proposed approach is capable of handling elaborated multi-objective situations that include patience in an intuitive and effective way.