Planning Motion Patterns of Human Figures Using a Multi-layered Grid and the Dynamics Filter

This paper presents a practical motion planner for humanoids and animated human gures. Modeling human motions as a sum of rigid body and cyclic motions, we identify body postures that represent the rigid-body part of typical motion patterns. This leads to a model of the con guration space that consists of a multi-layered grid, each layer corresponding to a single posture. A global search through this reduced con guration space yields a feasible path and the corresponding postures along the path. A velocity pro le is calculated along the optimal path, subject to the speed and acceleration limits assumed for each posture. Cyclic motions, generated from \primitive" cyclic motion patterns for each posture, are then added to the trajectory produced by the path planner. This \kinematic" motion is then modi ed by the dynamics lter [16] to result in dynamically consistent behavior. Examples are presented which demonstrate the use of this planner in an o ce environment.