Unified Motion Planning for Autonomous Digital Actor Paper: jc12-3-3332:2008/4/25 A Unified Approach to Planning Versatile Motions for an Autonomous Digital Actor

[Received; accepted] Enabling a digital actor to move autonomously in a virtual environment is a challenging problem that has attracted much attention in recent years. The systems proposed in several researches have been able to plan the walking motions of a humanoid on an uneven ter-rain. In this paper, we aim to design a planning sys-tem that can generate various types of motions for a humanoid with a unified planning approach. Based on our previous work, we add two additional motion abil-ities: leaping and moving obstacles into the system. In previous work, the order of moving obstacles is deter-mined first, and then the corresponding paths for the pushing/pulling motions are generated. In this work, we take a unified approach that accounts for all types of motions at the same time. We have implemented a planning system with this unified approach for a hu-manoid moving in a layered virtual environment. Sev-eral simulation examples are demonstrated in this pa-per to illustrate the effectiveness of the system