Inverse Geometric Locomotion

Quentin Becker1
Oliver Gross1,2
Mark Pauly1

1EPFL
2University of California, San Diego




Abstract

Numerous tasks in robotics and character animation involve solving combinations of inverse kinematics and motion planning problems that require the precise design of pose sequences to achieve desired motion objectives. However, accounting for the complex interplay between body deformations and resulting motion, especially through interactions with the environment, poses significant challenges for the design of such pose sequences. We propose a computational framework to address these challenges in scenarios where the motion of a deformable body is entirely determined by dynamic changes of its shape. Complementing recent methods on the forward problem—mapping shape sequences to global motion trajectories—we address the inverse problem of optimizing shape sequences to achieve user-defined motion objectives. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a diverse set of examples, producing realistic shape sequences that result in desired motion trajectories.



Resources

Inverse Geometric Locomotion
Quentin Becker*, Oliver Gross* and Mark Pauly
ACM Trans. Graph. 44, 4 (August 2025), 17 pages. DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3731187

[Paper] [Video] [Code]     *joint first authrors



Video



Acknowledgement

The rattlesnake mesh is courtesy of DigitalLife3D at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the robot snake mesh is courtesy of the MiniRo Lab at the University of Notre Dame, and the wood stick mesh is courtesy of 3.99 SHOP. This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant 200021-231293). Additional support was provided through Houdini software, courtesy of SideFX.