Kinematics & Inverse Kinematics
Kinematics
- gives motions in terms of joint angles, velocities, and positions
- used by most keyframing and procedural animation systems
Inverse kinematics
- determine joint angles from positions
- e.g. “calculate the shoulder, elbow, and wrist rotation parameters in order to put the hand here”
- better for interaction
- sometimes underdetermined (i.e. many combinations of joint angles to achieve a given end result)
- used a lot in robotics
Constrained Optimization
- Get from A to B doing the minimum possible work