by Harsh and Marisa

We wanted to play an action that would function on a different cost metric; one based off the visual symmetry between the two arms. In our specific case, we landed on making a half diamond shape where the second arm tries to mirror the first (the one connected to the ‘shoulder’) but in reverse . As the shoulder swings out the left, the elbow swings the second arm to the right at two times the magnitude of the shoulder arm in order to achieve a visual balance (so the elbow was always supposed to be -2x the shoulder). We had some interesting results in the beginning with timing not matching up, so we got a ‘sashay’ effect, which was actually quite soothing to look at it. It wasn’t the goal, but it would’ve been nice to play with in another iteration that might focus on the artistic side more.

The backup we ended with was alternating the state, setting angle position when rotational velocity crosses 0.

We tried to optimize the process, but did not quite get the cost function to work properly – this could be something we look into in future iterations