# Actuators `A La Mode: Modal Actuations for Soft Body Locomotion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Strike a Chord! Modal Kinetic Typography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38325/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional character animation specializes in characters with a rigidly articulated skeleton and a bipedal/quadripedal morphology. This assumption simplifies many aspects for designing physically based animations, like locomotion, but comes with the price of excluding characters of arbitrary deformable geometries. To remedy this, our framework makes use of a spatio-temporal actuation subspace built off of the natural vibration modes of the character geometry. The resulting actuation is coupled to a reduced fast soft body simulation, allowing us to formulate a locomotion optimization problem that is tractable for a wide variety of high resolution deformable characters.