Real Time Animation of Virtual Humans: A Trade-off Between Naturalness and Control

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation techniques. We discuss several aspects of motion naturalness and show how it can be evaluated. We conclude by showing the promise of combinations of different animation paradigms to enhance both naturalness and control

Development of an unsteady aerodynamic analysis for finite-deflection subsonic cascades

An unsteady potential flow analysis, which accounts for the effects of blade geometry and steady turning, was developed to predict aerodynamic forces and moments associated with free vibration or flutter phenomena in the fan, compressor, or turbine stages of modern jet engines. Based on the assumption of small amplitude blade motions, the unsteady flow is governed by linear equations with variable coefficients which depend on the underlying steady low. These equations were approximated using difference expressions determined from an implicit least squares development and applicable on arbitrary grids. The resulting linear system of algebraic equations is block tridiagonal, which permits an efficient, direct (i.e., noniterative) solution. The solution procedure was extended to treat blades with rounded or blunt edges at incidence relative to the inlet flow

Motion Cooperation: Smooth Piece-Wise Rigid Scene Flow from RGB-D Images

We propose a novel joint registration and segmentation approach to estimate scene flow from RGB-D images. Instead of assuming the scene to be composed of a number of independent rigidly-moving parts, we use non-binary labels to capture non-rigid deformations at transitions between the rigid parts of the scene. Thus, the velocity of any point can be computed as a linear combination (interpolation) of the estimated rigid motions, which provides better results than traditional sharp piecewise segmentations. Within a variational framework, the smooth segments of the scene and their corresponding rigid velocities are alternately refined until convergence. A K-means-based segmentation is employed as an initialization, and the number of regions is subsequently adapted during the optimization process to capture any arbitrary number of independently moving objects. We evaluate our approach with both synthetic and real RGB-D images that contain varied and large motions. The experiments show that our method estimates the scene flow more accurately than the most recent works in the field, and at the same time provides a meaningful segmentation of the scene based on 3D motion.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Spanish Government under the grant programs FPI-MICINN 2012 and DPI2014- 55826-R (co-founded by the European Regional Development Fund), as well as by the EU ERC grant Convex Vision (grant agreement no. 240168)

Movimientos simétrico lineales esféricos segmentados para interpolación de orientaciones en planificación de trayectorias de herramienta en CNC de 5 Ejes

RESUMEN: Este artículo emplea biarcos cuaterniónicos para interpolar un conjunto de orientaciones con restricciones de velocidad angular. La curva cuaterniónica resultante representa un movimiento simétrico lineal esférico segmentado con continuidad C1 . El propósito de este esfuerzo es poner en uso los movimientos simétrico lineales desde el punto de vista de aproximación e interpolación de movimiento y presentar su potencial aplicación en la simulación de mecanizado por Control Numérico Computarizado (CNC) y planeación de trayectorias de herramienta. Los biarcos cuaterniónicos pueden ser usados para aproximar curvas B-spline cuaterniónicas que representan movimientos esféricos racionales, los cuales tienen aplicaciones en planeación de trayectorias de robots, en CAD/CAM y en gráficas por computador.ABSTRACT: This paper employs quaternion biarcs to interpolate a set of orientations with angular velocity constraints. The resulting quaternion curve represents a piecewise line-symmetric spherical motion with C1 continuity. The purpose of this effort is to put line-symmetric motions into use from the viewpoint of motion approximation and interpolation, and to present their potential applications in Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machining simulation and tool path planning. Quaternion biarcs may be used to approximate B-spline quaternion curves that represent rational spherical motions that have applications in robot path planning, CAD/CAM and computer graphics

Robust Temporally Coherent Laplacian Protrusion Segmentation of 3D Articulated Bodies

In motion analysis and understanding it is important to be able to fit a suitable model or structure to the temporal series of observed data, in order to describe motion patterns in a compact way, and to discriminate between them. In an unsupervised context, i.e., no prior model of the moving object(s) is available, such a structure has to be learned from the data in a bottom-up fashion. In recent times, volumetric approaches in which the motion is captured from a number of cameras and a voxel-set representation of the body is built from the camera views, have gained ground due to attractive features such as inherent view-invariance and robustness to occlusions. Automatic, unsupervised segmentation of moving bodies along entire sequences, in a temporally-coherent and robust way, has the potential to provide a means of constructing a bottom-up model of the moving body, and track motion cues that may be later exploited for motion classification. Spectral methods such as locally linear embedding (LLE) can be useful in this context, as they preserve "protrusions", i.e., high-curvature regions of the 3D volume, of articulated shapes, while improving their separation in a lower dimensional space, making them in this way easier to cluster. In this paper we therefore propose a spectral approach to unsupervised and temporally-coherent body-protrusion segmentation along time sequences. Volumetric shapes are clustered in an embedding space, clusters are propagated in time to ensure coherence, and merged or split to accommodate changes in the body's topology. Experiments on both synthetic and real sequences of dense voxel-set data are shown. This supports the ability of the proposed method to cluster body-parts consistently over time in a totally unsupervised fashion, its robustness to sampling density and shape quality, and its potential for bottom-up model constructionComment: 31 pages, 26 figure

Motion generation for groups of robots: a centralized, geometric approach

We develop a method for generating smooth trajectories for a set of mobile robots. We show that, given two end configurations of the set of robots, by tuning one parameter, the user can choose an interpolating trajectory from a continuum of curves varying from that corresponding to maintaining a rigid formation to motion of the robots toward each other. The idea behind this method is to change the original constant kinetic energy metric in the configuration space and can be summarized into three steps. First, the energy of the motion as a rigid structure is decoupled from the energy of motion along directions that violate the rigid constraints. Second, the metric is shaped by assigning different weights to each term, and, third, geodesic flow is constructed for the modified metric. The optimal motions generated on the manifolds of rigid body displacements in 3-D space (SE(3)) or in plane (SE(2)) and the uniform rectilinear motion of each robot corresponding to a totally uncorrelated approach are particular cases of our general treatment