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Domain of Attraction Expansion for Physics-Based Character Control

Published: 29 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Determining effective control strategies and solutions for high-degree-of-freedom humanoid characters has been a difficult, ongoing problem. A controller is only valid for a subset of the states of the character, known as the domain of attraction (DOA). This article shows how many states that are initially outside the DOA can be brought inside it. Our first contribution is to show how DOA expansion can be performed for a high-dimensional simulated character. Our second contribution is to present an algorithm that efficiently increases the DOA using random trees that provide denser coverage than the trees produced by typical sampling-based motion-planning algorithms. The trees are constructed offline but can be queried fast enough for near-real-time control. We show the effect of DOA expansion on getting up, crouch-to-stand, jumping, and standing-twist controllers. We also show how DOA expansion can be used to connect controllers together.

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Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Domain of Attraction Expansion for Physics-Based Character Control
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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 36, Issue 2
    April 2017
    168 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/3068851
    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: 29 March 2017
    Accepted: 01 December 2016
    Revised: 01 November 2016
    Received: 01 November 2015
    Published in TOG Volume 36, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Computer animation
    2. character animation
    3. physics simulation

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