Experimentation needs theory, too

A Simple Juggling Robot: Theory and Experimentation

We have developed a formalism for describing and analyzing a very simple representative of a class of robotic tasks which involve repeated robot-environment interactions, among then the task of juggling. We review our empirical success to date with a new class of control algorithms for this task domain that we call “mirror algorithms.” These new nonlinear feedback algorithms were motivated stro...

Formal Language Theory: Integrating Experimentation and Proof

Since the 1930s, the subject of formal language theory, also known as automata theory, has been developed by computer scientists, linguists and mathematicians. Formal languages (or simply languages) are sets of strings over finite sets of symbols, called alphabets, and various ways of describing such languages have been developed and studied, including regular expressions (which " generate " la...

Theory-Ladenness and Scientific Instruments in Experimentation

Since the late 1950s one of the most important and influential views of post-positivist philosophy of science has been the theory-ladenness of observation. It comes in at least two forms: either as a psychological law pertaining to human perception (whether scientific or not) or as conceptual insight concerning the nature and functioning of scientific language and its meaning. According to its ...

Formal Language Theory: Integrating Experimentation and Proof

Engineering trust alignment: Theory, method and experimentation

In open multi-agent systems trust models are an important tool for agents to achieve effective interactions. However, in these kinds of open systems, the agents do not necessarily use the same, or even similar, trust models, leading to semantic differences between trust evaluations in the different agents. Hence, to successfully use communicated trust evaluations, the agents need to align their...