Feedback control for rotational movements in feature space

Synthesizing controllers for rotational movements in feature space is an open research problem and is particularly challenging because of the need to precisely regulate the character’s global orientation, angular momentum and inertia. This paper presents feature-based controllers for a wide variety of rotational movements, including cartwheels, dives and flips. We show that the controllers can be made robust to large external disturbances by using a time-invariant control scheme. The generality of the control laws is demonstrated by providing examples of the flip controller with different apexes, the diving controller with different heights and styles, the cartwheel controller with different speeds and straddle widths, etc. The controllers do not rely on any input motion or offline optimization.