A motion capture-based control-space approach for walking mannequins

Virtual mannequins need to navigate in order to interact with their environment. Their autonomy to accomplish the navigation task is ensured by locomotion controllers. Control inputs can be user-defined or automatically computed to achieve high level operations (e.g. obstacle avoidance). This paper presents a locomotion controller based on a motion capture edition technique. The inputs are the linear and the angular velocities. The solution works in real time and supports at any time continuous changes of the inputs. The controller combines three main components to synthesize a locomotion animation in a 4-stage process. The Motion Library stores motion capture samples. Motion captures are analysed to compute quantitative characteristics. The characteristics are represented into a linear control space. This geometric representation is adequate to select and to weight three motion samples with respect to the controller inputs. Locomotion cycles are synthesized by blending the selected motion samples. The blending operation is realized into the frequency domain. Successive postures are extracted from the synthesized cycles in order to complete the animation of the moving mannequin. The method is demonstrated in this paper in a locomotion planning context.