DSD - Dynamic Stack Decider: A Lightweight Decision Making Framework for Robots and Software Agents

We present the Dynamic Stack Decider (DSD), a lightweight open-source control architecture. It combines different well-known approaches and is inspired by behavior trees as well as hierarchical state machines. The DSD allows to design and structure complex behavior of robots as well as software agents while providing easy maintainability. Challenges that often occur in robotics, i.e., a dynamic environment and situation uncertainty, remain well-manageable. Furthermore, it allows fast modifications of the control flow, while providing the state-fullness of a state machine. The approach allows developing software using a simple Domain Specific Language (DSL) which defines the control flow and two types of elements that contain the programmed parts. The framework takes care of executing the demanded portions of the code and gives, due to its stack-like internal representation, the ability to verify preconditions while maintaining a clear structure. The presented software was used in different robotic scenarios and showed great performance in terms of flexibility and structuredness.