Gavw Grasping Planning

Title: Planning finger contact points for manipulation

Title: Full hand inverse kinematics and animation

Supervisors: Ben van Basten (basten[at]cs.uu.nl) and Frank van der Stappen (frankst[at]cs.uu.nl)

Description

When one takes a look at characters in games, one will see that picking-up actions are very badly animated. Game developers use many tricks to tackle this problem. Often, the object "suddenly" appears in the hands of the character. We want to work on a more sophisticated system that will allow realistic manipulation of the object.

This project basically consists of two master project assignments.

Project 1: Planning finger contact points for manipulation

Before a character can pick up an object, it needs to know WHERE to place its finger such that the object is safely in its hands. In games and simulations, the designer often manually determines the finger placements required for picking up.

We want to determine this automatically, techniques from robotics might need to be used to determine such finger placements. At first we will look at simple objects, such as small boxes or cylinders with perhaps only 2 or 3 fingers.

Project 2: Full hand inverse kinematics and animation

Often in games, the hand is treated as a rigid object. Fingers are not able to move. We want to allow full-hand grasping using all fingers.

After the desired finger placements are set, we need to know HOW to set the arm joints such that the fingertips will indeed end up at the desired positions. This process is called Inverse Kinematics. After the arm configuration is determined, an animation can be constructed that will grasp the object (and perhaps move it)

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