Exercise - Creating Animation Primitives

For this individual exercise, we will explore how to practice and record robot motion sequences which can be composed together.

A recurring idea in robot programming is the use of motion primitives, which are individual actions which be sequenced together to solve a task. For our movie performance, each primitive might take the form of a short dance step or phrase, or a individual reaction movement responding to another character.

Try it!

We will use the Finch-Animation-Deck sketch for this exercise. This example uses Finch-Drama-Library to implement an animation interface which allows recording individual primitives using a driving interface, then saving them as named primitives in a stored library. These primitives can then be replayed by name.

The comments in the sketch should guide through testing all the features as follows:

  1. Clearing the library to erase all stored primitives.
  2. Driving the robot using the keyboard.
  3. Choosing a name for a new primitive, then performing and saving it.
  4. Replaying actions by name.

Building a Performance

  1. First, decide on a basic story context and the role of your robot character.
  2. Try improvising robot movement to see what kinds of actions might be consistent with this character. Are they fast, slow, staccato, smooth?
  3. Try some short general-purpose expressions; can you animate a double-take? Surprise? Fear?
  4. When you are happy with a movement, choose a name and save it.
  5. Try programming a sequence using normal Snap! techniques and the play action "" from library [] command block to execute your primitives.

Garth Zeglin, Personal Robotics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University