Dynamical systems in robot control architectures: A building block perspective

The paper reviews a known robot control architecture using nonlinear analysis and control theory viewpoints. The architecture is based on a mesh of dynamic systems and feedthrough maps and is able to drive the robot under temporal constraints. The analysis points to an intuitive, though innovative, conclusion that control architectures can be constructed from a methodological perspective by mixing (i) dynamical systems with fixed points carefully selected to match mission requirements, and (ii) feedthrough maps that perform memoryless transformations on input data. Experiments using the Webots environment are presented to illustrate the ideas developed.