Section: New Results

Biomechanics for avatar animation

Participants : Julien Pettré [contact] , Charles Pontonnier, Georges Dumont, Franck Multon, Ana Lucia Cruz Ruiz, Steve Tonneau.

Bio-inpired controllers and planners are compelling for avatar animation. We are currently engaging several works on the subject within the frame of the ENTRACTE project 8.1.5 .

Ana-Lucia Cruz-Ruiz has been recruited as a PhD student since november 2013 to begin to work on musculoskeletal-based methods for avatar animation. More precisely, the goal of this thesis is to define and evaluate a modular and multiscale whole-body musculoskeletal model usable to analyze and human movement and synthetize realistiv avatar animations. The specificity of the subject is hidden in the words “modular” and “multiscale”. “Modular” says that the model has to be easily tunable to be modified in accordance with the investigated motor control theories (uncontrolled manifold, motor synergies,...). “Multiscale” means that the model has to exhibit multiple levels of details cohabiting at the same time, depending on the region of interest investigated. At last, the model have to be easily scalable, in order to be applied to different morphologies. Moreover, she currently explores musculoskeletal-based simplified joint behaviors to improve torque-based dynamics applications.

We also address the problem of planning human motion in constrained environment. In previous approach, planning human motion is performed based on robotics planning algorithms the objective of which is to avoid obstacles. In our approach, we suggest that creating contacts with the obstacles of the environment is actually a mean to perform a motion tasks. We thus model human motion as a sequence of contacts between humans and obstacles. A contact planner is being developed, and results being prepared for publication.