Feedback Control for Rotational Movements in Feature Space

Mazen Al Borno1     Eugene Fiume1    Aaron Hertzmann2    Martin de Lasa3   
1University of Toronto     2 Adobe Systems    3 Autodesk Canada

Teaser

Abstract

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.

Paper

Mazen Al Borno, Eugene Fiume, Aaron Hertzmann, Martin de Lasa. Feedback Control for Rotational Movements in Feature Space, to appear in the Proceedings of EUROGRAPHICS 2014 (preprint).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Manfredi Maggiore for introducing us to virtual constraints and for very helpful discussions, and to the referees for their feedback.