Seminar by Dr. Prabir K Pal
Modeling Animation Out of Behaviored Graphical Components
Dr. Prabir K Pal
Division of Remote Handling and Robotics
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
Mumbai
Date: August 21, 2001
Time: 03:30 PM
Venue: CC-217
Abstract
Almost all animate and inanimate entities we see around us change with time. The changes are brought about by changes in the values of their attributes. By using a set of parameters to represent the variable attributes of an entity, and by suitably manipulating their values at run-time, the behavior of an entity can be broadly mimicked in animation. The majority of entities are however all too complex to animate directly. They are better described in terms of smaller and simpler entities, which we call components. Each component is structurally and behaviorally complete and can be described independent of its application. In the present talk, we propose a scheme for 3D animation that broadly follows this line. The keystone of this scheme is a language, nicknamed 'V', which defines the structural and visual attributes of each component of the scene and associates a parameterized behavior with it, if necessary, in the form of a program script. Thereafter, wherever such a component appears, it does so with a built-in behavior, which can nevertheless be regulated by its higher-level component through its parameters. The advantage is that an entire animation can be modeled in a declarative fashion in terms of nested behaviored components. Besides, each component is easy to write, alter and reuse. The effort for development, debugging and maintenance of animation modeled in this way is much less as the concerns are almost always local.
About the Speaker
Dr. Prabir K. Pal is a Scientific Officer in the Division of remote handling & robotics of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. He did his graduation in physics from Presidency College, Calcutta and post-graduation in physics from University of Calcutta in 1974 and 1976 respectively. In 1978 he joined the Training School of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in the physics discipline. Over the years his interests shifted from physics to Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. His research interests include Gait studies of walking machines, Mobile robot navigation, Robot motion planning, telerobotics and graphical simulation of robots. He received his PhD from the University of Mumbai in 1997 for a thesis titled 'Planning motions of legged robots'. He visited University of Aizu, Japan as a Visiting Researcher in 1999-2000 where he worked on Internet telerobotics. At present he is occupied in experiments with a pioneer mobile robot for navigation in an unknown environment. The topic of his talk is a fallout of his attempts to build animations of robot operations.