Short-term Inbetweening of 3D Human Motions

Creating computer generated human animations without the use of motion capture technology is a tedious and time consuming activity. Although there are several publications regarding animation synthesis using data driven methods, not many are dedicated towards the task of inbetweening, which consists of generating transition movements between frames. A modified version of LSTM, called Recurrent Transition Network (RTN), solves the inbetweening task for walking motion based on ten initial frames and two final frames. In this work, we are interested on the short-term inbetweening task, where we need to use the least amount of frames to generate the missing frames for short-term transitions. We are also interested on different kinds of movements, such as martial arts and Indian dance. Thus, we adapt the Recurrent Transition Network (RTN) to require only the two firts frames and the last one, called ARTN, and propose a simple post processing method combining ARTN with linear interpolation, called ARTN+. The results show that the average error of ARTN+ is less than the average error of each method (RTN and interpolation) separately in the martial arts and Indian dance dataset.

Passive Walking Biped Robot Model with Flexible Viscoelastic Legs

To simulate the complex human walking motion accurately, a suitable biped model has to be proposed that can significantly translate the compliance of biological structures. In this way, the simplest passive walking model is often used as a standard benchmark for making the bipedal locomotion so natural and energy-efficient. This work is devoted to a presentation of the application of internal damping mechanism to the mathematical description of the simplest passive walking model with flexible legs. This feature can be taken into account by using the viscoelastic legs, which are constituted by the Kelvin–Voigt rheological model. Then, the update of the impulsive hybrid nonlinear dynamics of the simplest passive walker is obtained based on the Euler–Bernoulli’s beam theory and using a combination of Lagrange mechanics and the assumed mode method, along with the precise boundary conditions. The main goal of this study is to develop a numerical procedure based on the new definition of the step function for enforcing the biped start walking from stable condition and walking continuously. The study of the influence of various system parameters is carried out through bifurcation diagrams, highlighting the region of stable period-one gait cycles. Numerical simulations clearly prove that the overall effect of viscoelastic leg on the passive walking is efficient enough from the viewpoint of stability and energy dissipation.

Reproducing Human Arm Strategy and Its Contribution to Balance Recovery Through Model Predictive Control

The study of human balance recovery strategies is important for human balance rehabilitation and humanoid robot balance control. To date, many efforts have been made to improve balance during quiet standing and walking motions. Arm usage (arm strategy) has been proposed to control the balance during walking motion in the literature. However, limited research exists on the contributions of the arm strategy for balance recovery during quiet standing along with ankle and hip strategy. Therefore, in this study, we built a simplified model with arms and proposed a controller based on nonlinear model predictive control to achieve human-like balance control. Three arm states of the model, namely, active arms, passive arms, and fixed arms, were considered to discuss the contributions of arm usage to human balance recovery during quiet standing. Furthermore, various indexes such as root mean square deviation of joint angles and recovery energy consumption were verified to reveal the mechanism behind arm strategy employment. In this study, we demonstrate to computationally reproduce human-like balance recovery with and without arm rotation during quiet standing while applying different magnitudes of perturbing forces on the upper body. In addition, the conducted human balance experiments are presented as supplementary information in this paper to demonstrate the concept on a typical example of arm strategy.