Full-Body Hybrid Motor Control for Reaching

In this paper, we present a full-body motor control mechanism that generates coordinated and diverse motion during a reaching action. Our framework animates the full human body (stretching arms, flexing of the spine, as well as stepping forward) to facilitate the desired end effector behavior. We propose a hierarchical control system for controlling the arms, spine, and legs of the articulated character and present a controller-scheduling algorithm for coordinating the sub-controllers. High-level parameters can be used to produce variation in the movements for specific reaching tasks. We demonstrate a wide set of behaviors such as stepping and squatting to reach low distant targets, twisting and swinging up to reach high lateral targets, and we show variation in the synthesized motions.