APE: An environment for integrating animation and planning

Animating characters without specifying many details is a goal for animation in both the computer gaming industry and the film industry. The specific problem to be addressed in this thesis is to allow three-dimensional (3D) animated scenes to be controlled in real time using an automated planning system. Planning is a method that uses a logical representation of a world to achieve goals. In order to simplify the animation of a character in a scene, it may be helpful to convert high level logical representations to low level spatial operations.;APE is able to control animation in real-time using a planning system. It is the first system to use PDDL to plan actions for animation. It overcomes the problem of converting high level logic to low level spatial operations. The capabilities of APE were tested in a variety of situations.;The Animated Planning Environment (APE) was designed to merge a high level logical representation used in planning with a low level spatial representation used in animation. APE uses an association between Problem Domain Description Language (PDDL) actions and DirectX x files to allow the end-user to set a logical goal for an animated character to accomplish. By specifying the domain and the goal in PDDL, automatically creating a plan to achieve the goal, and mapping the actions in the plan to the character's animations, the steps to achieve the goal are animated.