Difference: ArticulatedSwimming (6 vs. 7)

Contibution: The paper presents an approach creating realistic swimming behaviour given the model of a body. The idea of the paper is simple: the liquid is simulated by the Navier-Stokes/Euler equations, and boundary conditions are given by the swimming creature. The gait of the creature is optimized in terms of efficiency (speed) and staying within certain limits of energy consumption.

Evaluation: It's really hard to evaluate appropriately, since it's hard (if possible at all?) to do mocap on real swimming creatures. So the evaluation is confined to "we tried this model and it looks good" - which is acceptable in this case.

Reproducibility: yes, possible to reproduce. It doesn't look like there anything is the paper that won't work, everything is very straightforward.

Improvements: Even though they did state their main limitation in the paper - the parameterization of the joint space, they didn't really elaborate on how important that is. As I understand, if we presume that the gait is parameterized by one sine function, the motion is 'static', i.e. the optimization cannot take into account any obstacles, other streams in the fluid, etc. - basically, everything that may make the motion uneven.

-- MikhailBessmeltsev - 01 Dec 2011