Efficient scheduling of behavior-processes on different time-scales

In behavior-oriented robotics, the control of a system is distributed over various processes or behaviors running in virtual parallel. However, the assignment of processing power to different processes is a non-trivial task. Existing approaches to this problem, like rate-monotonic scheduling, focus on the fulfilment of deadlines, i.e., upper time-bounds. For behavioral control, the periodicity of processes is also of interest. Here, a novel scheduling algorithm for behavioral processes at different time-scales is introduced, which ensures time-optimal and periodically balanced execution.