On the control of continuous, sequential and reactive behaviors for robot systems

Information about the speaker

Dr.-Ing. Raphael Deimel, team leader of the MTI-engAge group at TU Berlin, Germany, will give a talk about the control of continuous, sequential and reactive behaviors of robot systems. For this work he was honoured with the Best Paper Award at this year's Austrian Robotics Workshop.

Short Abstract

In interaction with humans or movable objects, robots not only need to react to surprising information quickly, but they also need to synchronize their motions with the world, which can be done by introducing decision points (discrete state transitions), or by continuously adjusting the execution velocity. A novel dynamical system based on stable heteroclinic channel networks that can represent static, markovian states as well as continuous transitions between states in a compact and consistent state vector is presented. This so-called phasestate machine can implement regular state machine semantics, but it additionally has the built-in capability to provide and adjust phases and blend consecutive movement primitives for smooth operation. In this talk, the dynamic properties, present examples for programming specific state machine semantics, and demonstrate the sequencing and mixing of continuous movement primitives is investigated.