Fast, Neat and Under Control: Inverse Steering Behaviors for Physical Autonomous Agents

Steering behaviors are a set of motion based reactive procedures used for navigating autonomous agents in their environment. Combinations of steering behaviors can be used to create complex behaviors. One problem inherent to existing approaches to arbitrating between single behaviors is that their combination may lead to suboptimal, undesired, or even catastrophic results in certain situations. In our paper we present a solution to these problems by introducing inverse steering behaviors for controlling physical agents. Inverse steering behaviors change the original concept of steering behaviors and facilitate improved arbitration between different options by using cost based heuristics. We also show a concrete application of inverse steering behaviors, namely the implementation of a dribbling skill with sophisticated obstacle avoidance for a RoboCup soccer agent.