Progressive Clamping

In this paper we propose the progressive clamping method to better model the kinematic anisotropy of joint limits for virtual mannequins or robots. Like recent approaches our method damps only the joints´ variation component heading towards the limits. In addition we propose to dynamically express the corrective joint variation as a highest priority constraint that naturally extends the management of inequality constraints. This process is iterative within linear computing cost of the number of independent joints. We present how our approach is exploited for the major classes of rotation joints from one and up to three degrees of freedom. A comparison with other joint limit avoidance methods is given. We demonstrate the validity of our approach on various experiments targeting on the control of virtual mannequins.