Motion Planning and Geometric Algorithms for Animating Virtual Demonstrators

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Marcelo Kallmann

DATE: Wednesday, October 15th 2014
PLACE: USI Lugano Campus, room A33, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30

ABSTRACT:
I will present in this talk our work on multi-modal whole-body motion planners that preserve the original quality of example motions given by direct demonstration. VR interfaces allowing users to interactively build motion clusters for inverse blending are presented and planning algorithms on blending space are then introduced. The approach is complemented with locomotion synthesis in order to well position virtual demonstrators for action execution, according to behavioral models derived from experiments with human subjects. As a result, autonomous virtual assistants are able to plan and execute motions that are similar to demonstrated examples and that address new constraints and parameterizations. I will also present an overview of additional projects developed at the computer graphics group of UC Merced, including rehabilitation applications and new results on local clearance triangulations, a structure I have developed for fast path planning with arbitrary clearance.

BIO:
Marcelo Kallmann is founding faculty and associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Merced. At UC Merced he also serves as chief scientist for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). He obtained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and before moving to UC Merced in 2005 he was research faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) and a scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). His areas of research include computer animation, virtual reality and humanoid motion planning. At UC Merced he established and leads the computer graphics research group (http://graphics.ucmerced.edu/). His work has been funded by several NSF awards and his recent work on triangulations for path planning runs inside the recently announced The Sims 4.

HOST: Prof. Fernando Pedone