Active compliance enables robots to carry out tasks in the presence of significant sensing and control errors. Compliant motions are quite difficult for humans to specify, however. Furthermore, robot programs are quite sensitive to details of geometry and to error characteristics and must, therefore, be constructed anew for each task. These factors motivate the search for automatic synthesis tools for robot program ming, especially for compliant motion. This paper describes a formal approach to the synthesis of compliant-motion strategies from geometric descriptions of assembly operations and explicit estimates of errors in sensing and control. A key aspect of the approach is that it provides criteria for correct ness of compliant-motion strategies.