"Hierarchy of Needs" for Robots: Control Synthesis for Compositions of Hierarchical, Complex Objectives

Ruoyu Lin; Magnus Egerstedt

ICRA 20252 citations

"Hierarchy of Needs" for Robots: Control Synthesis for Compositions of Hierarchical, Complex Objectives

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from Maslow's “hierarchy of needs”, this paper develops a real-time control synthesis framework for robots to address hierarchical, complex objectives, recognizing that their behaviors are inherently driven by underlying needs. Each need is encoded by the zero-superlevel set of a control barrier function (CBF), which can be time-varying, and all the needs at the same level in a hierarchy are composed into a single one through Boolean compositions of the corresponding CBFs. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a hypothetical interstellar exploration mission using laboratory robots, and novel results on nonsmooth CBF and time-varying CBF are derived.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{icra2025_hierarchyofneeds,
  title = {"Hierarchy of Needs" for Robots: Control Synthesis for Compositions of Hierarchical, Complex Objectives},
  author = {Ruoyu Lin and Magnus Egerstedt},
  booktitle = {ICRA 2025},
  year = {2025}
}