Animating complex articulated robots without a rigid hierarchy of transformations

This work presents an approach to fill a gap in the modeling of articulated robots: the ability to drive motion in a skeleton independent of a rigid hierarchy of transformations. Usually trees of joints and segments are used to model articulated robots that represent humans and animals. This type of topology can not be applied to articulated bodies where each segment can be rotated by more than one joint and it also not includes cases where the same joint performs motion in standard and reverse direction. The topology we propose in this article considers both cases and it is based on an auxiliary graph that guides the algorithm to apply the transformations to the joints origins and segments chain. Modelling complex legged robots like this can be useful in robotics due to its extreme versatility to climb or move into places of very difficult access.