Motion planning algorithms with applications beyond robotics in animation

Question

I am reading the introduction (chapter 1) of Principles of Robot Motion Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations by Choset et al. and they mention that some of the work in robotics has been applied to digital actors, animation etc and it isn't elaborated as to what these algorithms are and what problems they are solving in the other fields. What are they?

Algorithms developed for motion planning or sensor interpretation are not just for robots anymore. In the entertainment industry, motion planning has found a wide variety of applications in the generation of motion for digital actors, opening the way to exciting scenarios in video games, animation, and virtual environments

Answer 1

One example I see is animating human character on video game. On Unity game engine demo, they show there is human character that stand on big rock. The rock roll left and right while character maintain to stay on the top of rock. To achieve this, character has to control the center of mass itself by moving joint on his leg. That is by performing inverse kinematic.