The research involves empirical and theoretical inquiry into techniques for combining simple oscillators to produce new and more complex robot behaviors from existing simpler ones. Previously funded work in the PI's laboratory has already demonstrated that simple oscillators can be used to confer upon a robot superlative but narrow dynamical dexterity. The present study attempts to demonstrate that effective coupling techniques for such existing behavioral mechanisms can confer a much broader range of behavior. The empirical project addresses a robotic manipulation scenario termed ``Sensor Driven Dynamical Pick and Place.'' In this scenario, the robot uses a flat paddle to acquire balls thrown into the workspace; balance or bat them as required through a clutter; loft them into an out-of-reach destination receptacle; and resistunanticipated perturbations along the way. The recourse to oscillators reflects an almost exclusive theoretical focus on event driven manipulation. Such a commitment to feedback control addresses the fact that failures in machine reliability frequently occur because of events which are not intrinsically unrecoverable but which violate our models dramatically and cannot be anticipated. The focus on error detection and recovery in a dynamical setting brings into correspondence the concerns of the decade old (and still vigorously developing) fine motion planning literature and certain concepts and analytical tools from the century old (and still vigorously developing) dynamical systems literature that have proven useful in the PI's previously funded work.
