What Are Key Mechanisms for Adaptive Wall-Bouncing Control?

This paper describes the architecture for rhythmic movement generation suited to a juggling-like task involving sensory-motor coordination. Our approach, which is interpreted as a "bidirectional weak coupling" to the environment, does not require continuously monitoring the environment, but can adapt a robot to the change of the environment, owing to the interaction between the robot and the environment at the ball contact. The proposed architecture consists of three mechanisms, which are the "entrainment mechanism," the "discrete feedback mechanism", and the "open loop stable mechanism". Coexistence and redundancy of these different mechanisms guarantee a faster recovery after a disturbance, and a strong stability of the whole system