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Animatronic robots hold the promise of enabling natural human-robot interaction through lifelike facial expressions. However, generating realistic, speech-synchronized robot expressions poses significant challenges due to the complexities…
As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…
Robot manipulation is an important part of human-robot interaction technology. However, traditional pre-programmed methods can only accomplish simple and repetitive tasks. To enable effective communication between robots and humans, and to…
Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse…
Teaching robots novel behaviors typically requires motion demonstrations via teleoperation or kinaesthetic teaching, that is, physically guiding the robot. While recent work has explored using human sketches to specify desired behaviors,…
Japanese character figurines are popular and have pivot position in Otaku culture. Although numerous robots have been developed, less have focused on otaku-culture or on embodying the anime character figurine. Therefore, we take the first…
The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in mapping multimodal observations to robot behaviors. However, most current approaches rely on end-to-end visuomotor policies that remain opaque and difficult to…
We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…
Over the past three decades, countless embodied yet virtual agents have freely evolved inside computer simulations, but vanishingly few were realized as physical robots. This is because evolution was conducted at a level of abstraction that…
We try to perform geometrization of psychology by representing mental states, <<ideas>>, by points of a metric space, <<mental space>>. Evolution of ideas is described by dynamical systems in metric mental space. We apply the mental space…
With captivating visual effects, stylized 3D character animation has gained widespread use in cinematic production, advertising, social media, and the potential development of virtual reality (VR) non-player characters (NPCs). However,…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
Robot design is a nontrivial process that involves careful consideration of multiple criteria, including user specifications, kinematic structures, and visual appearance. Therefore, the design process often relies heavily on domain…
Foundation models are increasingly embedded in social robots, mediating not only what they say and do but also how they adapt to users over time. This shift renders traditional ``one-size-fits-all'' explanation strategies especially…
This paper introduces ManiFlow, a visuomotor imitation learning policy for general robot manipulation that generates precise, high-dimensional actions conditioned on diverse visual, language and proprioceptive inputs. We leverage flow…
Humans are able to seamlessly visually imitate others, by inferring their intentions and using past experience to achieve the same end goal. In other words, we can parse complex semantic knowledge from raw video and efficiently translate…
Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators' experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate…
Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…
Robot learning approaches such as behavior cloning and reinforcement learning have shown great promise in synthesizing robot skills from human demonstrations in specific environments. However, these approaches often require task-specific…