Actuators \`A La Mode: Modal Actuations for Soft Body Locomotion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework for soft body locomotion using modal actuations based on natural vibration modes, enabling physically plausible movement of deformable characters.

Contribution

It proposes a new actuation method leveraging modal analysis for soft bodies, allowing efficient locomotion optimization across diverse deformable geometries.

Findings

Effective locomotion control for high-resolution soft characters

Framework compatible with various deformable geometries

Real-time soft body simulation integration

Abstract

Traditional character animation specializes in characters with a rigidly articulated skeleton and a bipedal/quadripedal morphology. This assumption simplifies many aspects for designing physically based animations, like locomotion, but comes with the price of excluding characters of arbitrary deformable geometries. To remedy this, our framework makes use of a spatio-temporal actuation subspace built off of the natural vibration modes of the character geometry. The resulting actuation is coupled to a reduced fast soft body simulation, allowing us to formulate a locomotion optimization problem that is tractable for a wide variety of high resolution deformable characters.