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Interactive design of animated plushies

Published: 20 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We present a computational approach to creating animated plushies, soft robotic plush toys specifically-designed to reenact user-authored motions. Our design process is inspired by muscular hydrostat structures, which drive highly versatile motions in many biological systems. We begin by instrumenting simulated plush toys with a large number of small, independently-actuated, virtual muscle-fibers. Through an intuitive posing interface, users then begin animating their plushie. A novel numerical solver, reminiscent of inverse-kinematics, computes optimal contractions for each muscle-fiber such that the soft body of the plushie deforms to best match user input. By analyzing the co-activation patterns of the fibers that contribute most to the plushie's motions, our design system generates physically-realizable winch-tendon networks. Winch-tendon networks model the motorized cable-driven actuation mechanisms that drive the motions of our real-life plush toy prototypes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our computational approach by co-designing motions and actuation systems for a variety of physically-simulated and fabricated plushies.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 36, Issue 4
August 2017
2155 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/3072959
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 the author(s) 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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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 20 July 2017
Published in TOG Volume 36, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. animation
  2. computational design
  3. plushies
  4. soft robotics

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  • (2024)Bioinspired deformation computational design method for muscle-driven soft robots using MPMBioinspiration & Biomimetics10.1088/1748-3190/ad7081Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
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