CGV: EAGER: Simulation-Based Manipulation Capture for Dexterous Character Animation

通过我们的双手，我们交流、关心自己和他人，并使用工具影响我们的世界。然而，我们对如何控制我们的手来完成这些壮举的理解还处于初级阶段。灵巧的操作尤其具有挑战性，因为即使是“简单”的操作任务在细节上也是复杂的。例如，将扳手举到手中的任务可以分解为五个独立的动作，每个动作都可能需要专门的控制策略。研究这类活动的人类例子很重要；通过了解人类的专业知识，我们可以取得实际成果，例如用于培训和远程通信的物理智能动画人物，能够前所未有的灵活的机器人，以及在优雅和功能上远远超过当前最先进水平的假肢设计。在这些领域取得重大进展的关键障碍是，以便于分析和研究的形式捕捉人类操纵的困难。快速的接触事件序列、手的大量自由度以及手与物体之间的密切接触都导致使用传统方法创建不可能的捕获任务。研究人员正在开发一种替代方案：模拟运动捕捉，用户可以与运行中的模拟进行交互并对其进行引导。通过这种创新的方法，接触时间、接触面积和接触力等细节首次可用于常规操作任务。关键创新包括可变形的人类手(或全身)的快速模拟系统，以及以意图和精度控制如此高自由度模拟的新颖技术。与此同时，研究人员创建了一个操纵任务数据库，研究了用于动作分割和控制法开发的新语言，开发了用于抓取和操纵的稳健自主控制器，并研究了用于识别负担的新型分类器。

Through our hands, we communicate, care for ourselves and others, and use tools to affect our world. However, our understanding of how we control our hands to accomplish such feats is still in its infancy. Dexterous manipulation is especially challenging to study, as even "simple" manipulation tasks are complex in their details. The task of lifting a wrench into the hand, for example, can be decomposed into five separate actions, each of which may require a specialized control strategy. It is important to study human examples of such activities; through understanding human expertise we can reach practical outcomes such as physically intelligent animated characters for training and remote communication, robots capable of unprecedented dexterity, and prosthetic designs that far exceed the current state of the art in their elegance and functionality.The key hurdle in making a significant advance in these areas is the difficulty of capturing human manipulation in a form that facilitates analysis and study. The rapid sequence of contact events, the hand's large number of degrees of freedom, and close contact between the hand and object all contribute to creating an impossible capture task using traditional methods. The investigators are developing an alternative: simulation motion capture, where a user interacts with and guides a running simulation. Through this innovative approach, details such as contact timing, contact area, and contact forces are made available for the first time for general manipulation tasks. Key innovations include a fast simulation system for a deformable human hand (or full body) and novel techniques to control such a high degree of freedom simulation with intent and precision. In parallel, the investigators create a database of manipulation tasks, study new languages for action segmentation and control law development, develop robust autonomous controllers for grasping and manipulation, and study novel classifiers for recognition of affordances.