Motion planning for digital humans

Research efforts are underway to develop sophisticated computer models of human physiology, biomechanics and appearance. Applications of these "digital humans" range from medical research to virtual reality entertainment. This paper presents an overview of several motion planning techniques for automatically generating motion trajectories for digital humans. The ultimate goal is to create autonomous animated characters that are able to move naturally and realistically in response to high-level task commands. These "digital human" characters can be viewed as "virtual robots" operating in simulated environments, since developing software to control such characters shares much in common with programming real robots. Experimental results involving both simulated human characters and real humanoid robots are shown.