On The Structural Complexity of the Motion Description Language MDLe

(c) 2003 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/CDC.2003.1271663As modern control theory attempts to elucidate the complexity of systems that combine differential equations and event-driven logic, it must overcome challenges having to do with limited expressive power as well as practical difficulties associated with translating control algorithms into robust and reusable software. The Motion Description Language (MDL) and its "extended" counterpart MDLe, have been at the center of an ongoing effort to make progress on both of these fronts. The goal of this paper is to define MDLe as a formal language, thereby connecting with the vast literature on the subject, and to stimulate experimental work. We discuss the expressive power of MDLe and provide some examples of MDLe programs