Modal Locomotion: Controlling Passive Elastic Dynamics

Paul Kry (1, 2) , Lionel Reveret (1) , François Faure (1) , Marie-Paule Cani (1)

1 EVASION - Virtual environments for animation and image synthesis of natural objects
2 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]

We present a general method to intuitively create a wide range of locomotion controllers for 3D legged characters. The key of our approach is the assumption that efficient locomotion can exploit the natural vibration modes of the body, where these modes are related to morphological parameters such as the shape, size, mass, and joint stiffness. The vibration modes are computed for a mechanical model of any 3D character with rigid bones, elastic joints, and additional constraints as desired. A small number of vibration modes can be selected with respect to their relevance to locomotion patterns and combined into a compact controller driven by very few parameters. We show that these controllers can be used in dynamic simulations of simple creatures, and for kinematic animations of more complex creatures of a variety of shapes and sizes.

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]

Paul Kry, Lionel Reveret, François Faure, Marie-Paule Cani. Modal Locomotion: Controlling Passive Elastic Dynamics. SIGGRAPH 2007 - 34th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Aug 2007, San Diego, United States. pp.17:1-1. ⟨inria-00319409⟩