Locomotion Skills for Insects with Sample-based Controller

Abstract

Natural-looking insect animation is very difficult to simulate. The fast movement and small scale of insects often challenge the standard motion capture techniques. As for the manual key-framing or physics-driven methods, significant amounts of time and efforts are necessary due to the delicate structure of the insect, which prevents practical applications. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting a two-level control framework to efficiently automate the modeling and authoring of insects' locomotion. On the top level, we design a Triangle Placement Engine to automatically determine the location and orientation of insects' foot contacts, given the userdefined trajectory and settings, including speed, load, path and terrain etc. On the low-level, we relate the Central Pattern Generator to the triangle profiles with the assistance of a Controller Look-Up Table to fast simulate the physically-based movement of insects. With our approach, animators can directly author insects' behavior among a wide range of locomotion repertoire, including walking along a specified path or on an uneven terrain, dynamically adjusting to external perturbations and collectively transporting prey back to the nest.