2PAC: Two Point Attractors for Center of Mass Trajectories in Multi Contact Scenarios

Abstract

Fig. 1. Multi contact motions synthesized by our method. Synthesizing motions for legged characters in arbitrary environments is a long-standing problem that has recently received a lot of attention from the computer graphics community. We tackle this problem with a procedural approach that is generic, fully automatic and independent from motion capture data. The main contribution of this paper is a point-mass-model-based method to synthesize Center Of Mass trajectories. These trajectories are then used to generate the whole-body motion of the character. The use of a point mass model often results in physically inconsistent motions and joint limit violations. We mitigate these issues through the use of a novel formulation of the kinematic constraints which allows us to generate a quasi-static Center Of Mass trajectory, in a way that is both user-friendly and computationally efficient. We also show that the quasi-static constraint can be relaxed to generate motions usable for applications of computer graphics (on average 83% of a given trajectory remain physically consistent). Our method was integrated in our open-source contact planner and tested with different scenarios -some never addressed before-featuring legged characters performing non-gaited motions in cluttered environments. The computational efficiency of our trajectory generation algorithm (under ten ms to compute one second of motion) enables us to synthesize motions in a few seconds, one order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods.

Publication
IEEE Transaction on Graphics