Monitoring, analyzing, or comparing the motions of a robot can be a critical activity but a tedious and inefficient one in research settings and practical applications. In this paper, we present an approach we call motion synopsis for providing users with a global view of a robot’s motion trajectory as a set of key poses in a static 2D image, allowing for more efficient robot motion review, preview, analysis, and comparisons. To accomplish this presentation, we construct a 3D scene, select a camera view direction and position based on the motion data, decide what interior poses should be shown based on robot motion features, and organize the robot mesh models and graphical information in a way that provides the user with an at-a-glance view of the motion. Through examples and a user study, we document how our approach performs against alternative summarization techniques and highlight where the approach offers benefit and where it is limited.

@InProceedings{RMG16,
  author       = "Rakita, Daniel and Mutlu, Bilge and Gleicher, Michael",
  title        = "Motion Synopsis for Robot Arm Trajectories",
  booktitle    = "International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication",
  month        = "aug",
  year         = "2016",
  publisher    = "IEEE",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2016/RMG16"
}