Discretionary behavior switching: analysis and synthesis results

In previous work, we addressed how the world sometimes mandates switches in human behaviors (M.A. Goodrich et al., 1999). This led to a characterization of how humans manage such mandatory transitions. In addition to mandatory behavior switches, there are also situations where humans exhibit discretionary behavior switches. The authors present a mathematical characterization of discretionary behavior switches which is applicable to both modeling human behavior generation as well as to developing action selection mechanisms for behavior based robotics. We support this model by analyzing behaviors observed in human subjects and by synthesizing behaviors in a mobile robot