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We propose a method for generating video-realistic animations of real humans under user control. In contrast to conventional human character rendering, we do not require the availability of a production-quality photo-realistic 3D model of…

Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…

This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects) of cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of…

Collaborative interactions require social robots to adapt to the dynamics of human affective behaviour. Yet, current approaches for affective behaviour generation in robots focus on instantaneous perception to generate a one-to-one mapping…

Our animation studio has developed a practical style transfer pipeline for creating stylized 3D animation, which is suitable for complex real-world production. This paper presents the insights from our development process, where we explored…

Real-time hair simulation is a vital component in creating believable virtual avatars, as it provides a sense of immersion and authenticity. The dynamic behavior of hair, such as bouncing or swaying in response to character movements like…

Generalist robot policies, trained on large and diverse datasets, have demonstrated the ability to generalize across a wide spectrum of behaviors, enabling a single policy to act in varied real-world environments. However, they still fall…

Training general-purpose robots requires learning from large and diverse data sources. Current approaches rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We present a scalable framework for training manipulation…

The ability to display rich facial expressions is crucial for human-like robotic heads. While manually defining such expressions is intricate, there already exist approaches to automatically learn them. In this work one such approach is…

Socially competent robots should be equipped with the ability to perceive the world that surrounds them and communicate about it in a human-like manner. Representative skills that exhibit such ability include generating image descriptions…

The production of 2D animation follows an industry-standard workflow, encompassing four essential stages: character design, keyframe animation, in-betweening, and coloring. Our research focuses on reducing the labor costs in the above…

This research paper addresses the problem of generating involuntary and precise animation of quadrupeds with automatic rigging system of various character types. The technique proposed through this research is based on a two tier animation…

To better interact with users, a social robot should understand the users' behavior, infer the intention, and respond appropriately. Machine learning is one way of implementing robot intelligence. It provides the ability to automatically…

Foundation models are a promising path toward general-purpose and user-friendly robots. The prevalent approach involves training a generalist policy that, like a reinforcement learning policy, uses observations to output actions. Although…

The co-adaptation of robots has been a long-standing research endeavour with the goal of adapting both body and behaviour of a system for a given task, inspired by the natural evolution of animals. Co-adaptation has the potential to…

Recent years have seen a growth in the number of industrial robots working closely with end-users such as factory workers. This growing use of collaborative robots has been enabled in part due to the availability of end-user robot…

As robots increasingly become part of shared human spaces, their movements must transcend basic functionality by incorporating expressive qualities to enhance engagement and communication. This paper introduces a movement-centered design…

Over the past decades, research in cognitive and affective neuroscience has emphasized that emotion is crucial for human intelligence and in fact inseparable from cognition. Concurrently, there has been growing interest in simulating and…

For the last decades, the concern of producing convincing facial animation has garnered great interest, that has only been accelerating with the recent explosion of 3D content in both entertainment and professional activities. The use of…

This work aims to learn how to perform complex robot manipulation tasks that are composed of several, consecutively executed low-level sub-tasks, given as input a few visual demonstrations of the tasks performed by a person. The sub-tasks…