INTERACTIVE BODY AWARENESS

An important problem in the animation of human-like agents is self col lision. While the problem of adjacent segment intersection can often b e 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 tra ditional motion planning approach, an efficient way to handle obstacle avoidance through collision response is proposed. This reactive behav iour is driven by inputs from the agent's simulated sensors which dete ct obstacles. A self-collision response system has been implemented fo llowing this approach. Its performance demonstrates that collision avo idance can be performed automatically in an interactive computer anima tion environment. This approach has also been successfully extended to handle collisions of agents with environment obstacles.