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SUMMARY:Discovery of Complex Behaviors through Contact-Invariant Optimizat
 ion - Igor Mordatch (University of Washington)
DTSTART:20120619T100000Z
DTEND:20120619T110000Z
UID:TALK38533@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Zoubin Ghahramani
DESCRIPTION:I will present a recent motion behavior synthesis framework ca
 pable of producing a wide variety of important human behaviours\, includin
 g locomotion\, getting up\, crawling\, climbing\, carrying objects\, acrob
 atics\, and various cooperative actions involving two characters and their
  manipulation of the environment. The framework can also be applied to syn
 thesis of dexterous hand manipulation tasks\, including grasping and picki
 ng up objects\, twirling them between the fingers\, tossing and catching\
 , and drawing.\n\nAt the core of the framework is the contact-invariant op
 timization (CIO) method\, which enables simultaneous optimization of motio
 n trajectory and contact states. This is done by augmenting the search spa
 ce with scalar auxiliary variables that indicate whether a potential conta
 ct (such as contact between foot and ground) should be active in a given p
 hase of the motion. These auxiliary variables affect not only the cost fun
 ction but also the dynamics (by enabling and disabling contact forces)\, a
 nd are optimized together with the motion trajectory.\n\nThis is joint wor
 k with Zoran Popovic and Emanuel Todorov.
LOCATION:Engineering Department\, CBL Room BE-438
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