Synthesis of constrained walking skills

Abstract

Simulated characters in simulated worlds require simulated skills. We develop control strategies that enable physically-simulated characters to dynamically navigate environments with significant stepping constraints, such as sequences of gaps. We present a synthesis-analysis-synthesis framework for this type of problem. First, an offline optimization method is applied in order to compute example control solutions for randomly-generated example problems from the given task domain. Second, the example motions and their underlying control patterns are analyzed to build a low-dimensional step-to-step model of the dynamics. Third, this model is exploited by a planner to solve new instances of the task at interactive rates. We demonstrate real-time navigation across constrained terrain for physics-based simulations of 2D and 3D characters. Because the framework sythesizes its own example data, it can be applied to bipedal characters for which no motion data is available.