Behavior trees for AI: How they work

I used this article (and some other pieces) to help with some robotics research in Python a few months ago. Behavior trees are fantastic abstractions that definitely simplify FSM code, but I found that working within the constraints of decorators could really complicate behavior architectures that can instead be implemented more linearly. Specifically, I wanted to have an overall obstacle avoidance behavior separated from individual movements, but ended up implementing an obstacle avoidance function library totally separate from the BT.

Nice article. This looks a bit like a way to implement a scripting language that uses lightweight threads in a system that doesn't have it built in.

If you're using a language that has either lightweight threads or async/await built in, would you still use a behavior tree, or would you just write code?

Interesting article. It seems to me like what you really want here is to do this in a lisp/scheme. Then you can use the full power of lisp (it's the exact same syntax as the behavior tree), leverage lisp's built-in control flow constructs, and just implement nodes as functions with side-effects that return either true, false, or null or something.