Interactive body awareness

Abstract An important problem in the animation of human-like agents is self collision . While the problem of adjacent segment intersection can often be eliminated by explicitly limiting joint angles, avoiding collisions of nonadjacent segments is much more difficult when the response time is constrained in an interactive environment. Instead of using the traditional motion planning approach, an efficient way to handle obstacle avoidance through Collision response is proposed. This reactive behaviour is driven by inputs from the agent's simulated sensors which detect obstacles. A self-collision response system has been implemented following this approach. Its performance demonstrates that collision avoidance can be performed automatically in an interactive computer animation environment. This approach has also been successfully extended to handle collisions of agents with environment obstacles.