Locomotion Skills for Simulated Quadrupeds

ACM Transaction on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2011, to appear)

Stelian Coros     Andrej Karpathy     Ben Jones     Lionel Reveret     Michiel van de Panne

University of British Columbia
Disney Research Zurich
INRIA, Grenoble University, CNRS
 

 

Real-time physics-based quadruped simulations of gaits (walk, trot, canter, transverse gallop, pace, rotary gallop), gait transitions, sitting and standing up, targeted jumps, and jumps on-to and off-of platforms.

Abstract

We develop an integrated set of gaits and skills for a physics-based simulation of a quadruped. The motion repertoire for our simulated dog includes walk, trot, pace, canter, transverse gallop, rotary gallop, leaps capable of jumping on-and-off platforms and over obstacles, sitting, lying down, standing up, and getting up from a fall. The controllers use a representation based on gait graphs, a dual leg frame model, a flexible spine model, and the extensive use of internal virtual forces applied via the Jacobian transpose. Optimizations are applied to these control abstractions in order to achieve robust gaits and leaps with desired motion styles. The resulting gaits are evaluated for robustness with respect to push disturbances and the traversal of variable terrain. The simulated motions are also compared to motion data captured from a filmed dog.

Paper

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BibTeX
@ARTICLE{2011-TOG-quadruped,
    author = {Stelian Coros and Andrej Karpathy and Ben Jones and Lionel Reveret and Michiel van de Panne},
    title = {Locomotion Skills for Simulated Quadrupeds},
    journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
    year = {2011},
    volume = {30},
    number = {4},
    pages = {Article TBD}
}
Funding
   NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada)
   GRAND NCE: Graphics, Animation, and New Media
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