Timed robotic actions so that they are initiated or terminated just in time can be crucial in many tasks and scenarios in which the robot has to coordinate with other robotic agents or to interact with external entities such as moving objects. The analogy with human movement coordination has motivated an approach in which timed movements are generated from stable periodic solutions of dynamical systems, which are turned on and off in time to initiate and terminate a timed motor act. Here we extend this approach to generate sequences of timed motor actions required to intercept and hit a rolling ball on an inclined plane. The proposed system combines attractor dynamics for the robot's end-effector heading direction, fixed point attractor for end-effector postural states, limit cycle attractor dynamics for the end-effector speed and competitive neural dynamics to organize the different behaviors and movement phases. The ball interception point and time to contact are predicted based on a Kalman estimate of the ball's kinematics. The work is implemented on a redundant manipulator CoRA platform and the ball motion is monitored by the manipulator's vision system.
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