Papers for

virtual trainers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Muscle-driven simulation creates realistic sprinting without real examples

Learning Realistic Athletic Sprinting Without Demonstrations

Abstract: We present a muscle-driven simulation system for generating biomechanically accurate motion for high-speed athletic locomotion tasks that does not require motion demonstrations. Our approach integrates state-of-the-art biomechanical athlete models into a new, high-performance GPU simulator capable of running at 1000x real-time. High-throughput simulation enables large-batch reinforcement learning to train control policies that operate directly in the model's high-dimensional muscle excitation space, and are guided only by task-specific episode termination conditions and a reward that encourages maximizing speed while reducing forces needed to respect joint limits. These policies train within a few hours on a single GPU and generate "near visually realistic" motions for complete athletic activities such as a full 100-meter sprint or performing popular athletic locomotion drills like side-shuffling, backpedaling, and carioca. The generated sprinting motions also exhibit strong agreement with experimental data captured from sprinters.

Thu 10 SeptGraphics
The gist
High-speed running motions are hard to create realistically in simulations without using actual video or motion capture data. The authors built a fast computer system that uses detailed muscle models and learns to run quickly just by trying different motions and getting rewards for speed and safety. This means their system can generate realistic sprinting and athletic movements like side-stepping or backpedaling without needing to watch real athletes. The simulated running looks a lot like real runners according to data comparisons.
Open 2609.11083v1