We report on our efforts to develop a sequential robot controllercomposition 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.

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The Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction (P2P-HRI) project is developing techniques to improve task coordination and collaboration between human and robot partners. Our hypothesis is that peer-to-peer interaction can enable robots to collaborate in a competent, non-disruptive (i.e., natural) manner with users who have limited training, experience, or knowledge of robotics. Specifically, we believe that failures and limitations of autonomy (in planning, in execution, etc.) can be compensated for using human-robot interaction. In this paper, we present an overview of P2P-HRI, describe our development approach and discuss our evaluation methodology.

We report on our initial efforts to build robot feedback controllers that develop increased capability from simpler constituent controllers. Previous work with our three degree of freedom robot has resulted in a machine that exhibits various dynamically dexterous skills of superlative ability but very narrow behavioral scope. We focus here on the development of both a formalism and practice for the composition of constituent controllers. The composite should yield automatically purposive combinations of these skills that reach goals no one of the defining controllers could have achieved in isolation. The specific task we initially target, the "dynamical pick and place", requires the robot to acquire balls that have been "randomly" thrown into its work space and set them safely at rest in a specified location. We present a brief overview of the constituent behaviors and a mechanism for their combination along with documentation of our preliminary empirical successes. Comments Copyright 1995 IEEE. Reprinted from Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on IntelligentRobots and Systems 95. 'Human Robot Interaction and Cooperative Robots.', Volume 3, 1995, pages 292-297. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Pennsylvania's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it. NOTE: At the time of publication, author Daniel Koditschek was affiliated with the University of Michigan. Currently, he is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.