A family of robot control strategies for intermittent dynamical environments

A formalism is developed for describing and analyzing a very simple representation of a class of robotic tasks which require dynamical dexterity, among them the task of juggling. Empirical success has been achieved with a class of control algorithms for this task domain, called mirror algorithms. Using the formalism for representing the task domain, and encoding within it the desired robot behavior, it can be proven that a suitable mirror algorithm is correct with respect to a special task. Although the generation of algorithm geometry is completely heuristic at present, the analytical tractability of the resulting robot-environment closed loop, which is demonstrated, raises the hope that sufficient understanding may soon be realized to afford automatic translation of suitably expressed task definitions into provable correct empirically valid robot controller designs.<>