Learning to Sit: Synthesizing Human-Chair Interactions via Hierarchical Control.

Recent progress on physics-based character animation has shown impressive breakthroughs on human motion synthesis, through the imitation of motion capture data via deep reinforcement learning. However, results have mostly been demonstrated on imitating a single distinct motion pattern, and do not generalize to interactive tasks that require flexible motion patterns due to varying human-object spatial configurations. In this paper, we focus on one class of interactive task---sitting onto a chair. We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework which relies on a collection of subtask controllers trained to imitate simple, reusable mocap motions, and a meta controller trained to execute the subtasks properly to complete the main task. We experimentally demonstrate the strength of our approach over different single level and hierarchical baselines. We also show that our approach can be applied to motion prediction given an image input. A video highlight can be found at this https URL.