Climbing Motion Synthesis using Reinforcement Learning

Although there is an increasing demand for capturing various natural motions, collecting climbing motion data is difficult due to technical complexities, related to obscured markers. Additionally, scanning climbing structures and preparing diverse routes further complicate the collection of necessary data. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a climbing motion synthesis using reinforcement learning. The method comprises two learning stages. Firstly, the hanging policy is trained to grasp holds in a natural posture. Once the policy is obtained, it is used to extract the positions of the holds, postures, and gripping states, thus forming a dataset of favorable initial poses. Subsequently, the climbing policy is trained to execute actual climbing maneuvers using this initial state dataset. The climbing policy allows the character to move to the target location using limbs more evenly in a natural posture. Experiments have shown that the proposed method can effectively explore the space of good postures for climbing and use limbs more evenly. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in exploring optimal climbing postures and promoting balanced limb utilization.