Sequential Composition of Dynamically Dexterous Robot Behaviors

TLDR

A flat‑paddle robot must repeatedly strike a thrown ball until it rests at a specified location, but an obstacle in its workspace forces it to release the ball temporarily to achieve the desired state. The study aims to develop a sequential robot controller‑composition technique for dexterous batting maneuvers. The authors design a controller‑composition framework that sequences individual controllers to achieve the batting task. The composed controllers guarantee that a ball introduced in the safe workspace remains there and is ultimately brought to the goal, as confirmed by experimental results and descriptive statistics.

Abstract

We report on our efforts to develop a sequential robot controller-composition technique in the context of dexterous “batting” maneuvers. A robot with a flat paddle is required to strike repeatedly at a thrown ball until the ball is brought to rest on the paddle at a specified location. The robot’s reachable workspace is blocked by an obstacle that disconnects the free space formed when the ball and paddle remain in contact, forcing the machine to “let go” for a time to bring the ball to the desired state. The controller compositions we create guarantee that a ball introduced in the “safe workspace” remains there and is ultimately brought to the goal. We report on experimental results from an implementation of these formal composition methods, and present descriptive statistics characterizing the experiments.