Interactive design of expressive locomotion controllers for humanoid robots

This paper presents an interactive dynamic controller used to generate locomotion patterns for humanoid robots. The purpose of this work is to provide animators and artists easy and intuitive tools to design expressive motions for humanoid robots. A review of similar work in the computer animation community has guided our choices regarding the implementation and level of interaction between the user and an inverse dynamics solver. We have used our controller on a model of the Aldebaran humanoid robot Nao, and have generated a few expressive locomotion patterns that are presented in the experimental section of this paper.