Choreography for Marionettes: Imitation, Planning, and Control

This paper presents a project aimed at the creation of fully automated marionettes for puppet plays, to be used in stage plays at the Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts. In fact, marionettes are sophisticated and challenging mechanical systems, and therefore represent good test-beds for many current issues in robotics, such as systematic modeling of relatively high degree of freedom systems, semantics of high-level motion planning and control, and numerical optimization techniques for motion imitation and generation. This paper presents our approach to these problems, and highlights how insights from puppeteers can aid in the creation of a systematic framework for modeling and control of these complex mechanical systems.