Drive-Based Motivation for Coordination of Limit Cycle Behaviors

Constructing autonomous systems capable of high-level behaviors often involves reducing these behaviors to a collection of low-level tasks. This requires developing a method for switching among possible tasks, for example using a hybrid automaton. Recent work has developed an alternative approach using continuous dynamical systems that have an internal drive state to select the desired task. In one particular result, authors considered a scenario where individual behaviors were encoded in control vector fields with unique, globally stable equilibria. A further level of complexity arises when one seeks to create a system that switches between tasks encoded as globally attracting sets with recurrent behaviors, rather than as point attractors. This work outlines the problem using the recently-developed drive-based dynamical framework. First we generalize the formulation of tasks as one part attracting set and one part recurrent behavior on said attracting set. Then as a proof-of-concept we demonstrate the existence of an attracting set consisting of orbits that repeatedly flow between two canonical limit cycles (e.g., Hopf oscillators).