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Feature-based locomotion controllers

Published: 26 July 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces an approach to control of physics-based characters based on high-level features of movement, such as center-of-mass, angular momentum, and end-effectors. Objective terms are used to control each feature, and are combined by a prioritization algorithm. We show how locomotion can be expressed in terms of a small number of features that control balance and end-effectors. This approach is used to build controllers for human balancing, standing jump, and walking. These controllers provide numerous benefits: human-like qualities such as arm-swing, heel-off, and hip-shoulder counter-rotation emerge automatically during walking; controllers are robust to changes in body parameters; control parameters and goals may be modified at run-time; control parameters apply to intuitive properties such as center-of-mass height; and controllers may be mapped onto entirely new bipeds with different topology and mass distribution, without modifications to the controller itself. No motion capture or off-line optimization process is used.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 29, Issue 4
July 2010
942 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/1778765
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 26 July 2010
Published in TOG Volume 29, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. balancing
  2. control
  3. jumping
  4. physics-based animation
  5. walking

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  • (2024)SuperPADL: Scaling Language-Directed Physics-Based Control with Progressive Supervised DistillationACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Conference Papers10.1145/3641519.3657492(1-11)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2024
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