The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Even such simple tasks as placing a box on a shelf are difficult to animate, because the animator must carefully position the character to satisfy geometric and balance constraints while creating motion to perform the task with a natural-looking style. In this paper, we explore an approach for animating characters manipulating objects that combines the power of path planning with the domain knowledge inherent in data-driven, constraint-based inverse kinematics. A path planner is used to find a motion for the object such that the corresponding poses of the character satisfy geometric, kinematic, and posture constraints. The inverse kinematics computation of the character's pose resolves redundancy by biasing the solution toward natural-looking poses extracted from a database of captured motions. Having this database greatly helps to increase the quality of the output motion. The computed path is converted to a motion trajectory using a model of the velocity profile. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm by generating animations across a wide range of scenarios that cover variations in the geometric, kinematic, and dynamic models of the character, the manipulated object, and obstacles in the scene.

Keywords

human animation, manipulation, motion planning, inverse kinematics

Notes

Number of pages: 8

Note: Project Page: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/planning/

Quicktime Video available at: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/planning/planning.mov

Text Reference

Katsu Yamane, James Kuffner, and Jessica K Hodgins, "Synthesizing Animations of Human Manipulation Tasks," ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2004), , August, 2004

BibTeX Reference

@article{Yamane_2004_4749,
   author = "Katsu Yamane and James Kuffner and Jessica K Hodgins",
   title = "Synthesizing Animations of Human Manipulation Tasks",
   journal = "ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2004)",
   publisher = "ACM",
   month = "August",
   year = "2004",
   Notes = "Project Page: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/planning/

Quicktime Video available at: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/planning/planning.mov"
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu