A Unified Approach to Planning Versatile Motions for an Autonomous Digital Actor

Abstract

Enabling a digital actor to move autonomously in a virtual environment is a challenging problem that has attracted much attention in recent years. The systems proposed in several researches have been able to plan the walking motions of a humanoid on an uneven terrain. In this paper, we aim to design a planning system that can generate various types of motions for a humanoid with a unified planning approach. Based on our previous work, we add two additional motion abilities: leaping and moving obstacles into the system. In previous work, the order of moving obstacles is determined first, and then the corresponding paths for the pushing/pulling motions are generated. In this work, we take a unified approach that accounts for all types of motions at the same time. We have implemented a planning system with this unified approach for a humanoid moving in a layered virtual environment. Several simulation examples are demonstrated in this paper to illustrate the effectiveness of the system.