The Unified Behavior Framework for the Simulation of Autonomous Agents

Since the 1980s, researchers have designed a variety of robot control architectures intending to imbue robots with some degree of autonomy. A recently developed architecture, the UBF, implements a variation of the three-layer architecture with a reactive controller to rapidly make behavior decisions. Additionally, the UBF utilizes software design patterns that promote the reuse of code and free designers to dynamically switch between behavior paradigms. This paper explores the application of the UBF to the simulation domain. By employing software engineering principles to implement the UBF architecture within an open-source simulation framework, we have extended the versatility of both. The consolidation of these frameworks assists the designer in efficiently constructing simulations of one or more autonomous agents that exhibit similar behaviors. A typical air-to-air engagement scenario between six UBF agents controlling both friendly and enemy aircraft demonstrates the utility of the UBF architecture as a flexible mechanism for reusing behavior code and rapidly creating autonomous agents in simulation