Interactive generation of dynamically feasible robot trajectories from sketches using temporal mimicking

This paper presents a method for generating dynamically-feasible, natural-looking robot motion from freehand sketches. Using trajectory optimization, it handles sketches that are too fast, jerky, or pass out of reach by enforcing the constraints of the robot's dynamic limitations while minimizing the relative temporal differences between the robot's trajectory and the sketch. To make the optimization fast enough for interactive use, a variety of enhancements are employed including decoupling the geometric and temporal optimizations and methods to select good initial trajectories. The technique is also applicable to transferring human motions onto robots with non-human appearance and dynamics, and we use our method to demonstrate a simulated humanoid imitating a golf swing as well as an industrial robot performing the motion of writing a cursive “hello” word.