Curved Path Walking

Research on biped locomotion has focused on sagittal plane walking in which the stepping path is a straight line. Because a walking path is often curved in a three dimensional environment, a 3D locomotion subsystem is required to provide general walking animation. In building a 3D locomotion subsystem, we tried to utilize pre-existing straight path (2D) systems. The movement of the center of the body is important in determining the amount of banking and turning. The center site is defined to be the midpoint between the two hip joints. An algorithm to obtain the center site trajectory that realizes the given curved walking path is presented. From the position and orientation of the center site, we compute stance and swing leg configuration as well as the upper body configuration, based on the underlying 2D system. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-92-02. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/372