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3D animations are an effective method to learn about complex dynamic phenomena, such as mesoscale biological processes. The animators' goals are to convey a sense of the scene's overall complexity while, at the same time, visually guiding…

Developing natural and diverse locomotion controllers for quadruped robots that can adapt to complex terrains while preserving motion style remains a significant challenge. Existing imitation-based methods face a fundamental optimization…

Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…

Learning a locomotion controller for a musculoskeletal system is challenging due to over-actuation and high-dimensional action space. While many reinforcement learning methods attempt to address this issue, they often struggle to learn…

The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…

Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…

Series elastic robots are best able to follow trajectories which obey the limitations of their actuators, since they cannot instantly change their joint forces. In fact, the performance of series elastic actuators can surpass that of ideal…

In this work, we present Conditional Adversarial Latent Models (CALM), an approach for generating diverse and directable behaviors for user-controlled interactive virtual characters. Using imitation learning, CALM learns a representation of…

Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…

In this work we present a framework that is capable of accurately representing soft robotic actuators in a multiphysics environment in real-time. We propose a constraint-based dynamics model of a 1-dimensional pneumatic soft actuator that…

Synthesizing graceful and life-like behaviors for physically simulated characters has been a fundamental challenge in computer animation. Data-driven methods that leverage motion tracking are a prominent class of techniques for producing…

Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle…

Locomotion has seen dramatic progress for walking or running across challenging terrains. However, robotic quadrupeds are still far behind their biological counterparts, such as dogs, which display a variety of agile skills and can use the…

Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…

Realistic animatable human avatars from monocular videos are crucial for advancing human-robot interaction and enhancing immersive virtual experiences. While recent research on 3DGS-based human avatars has made progress, it still struggles…

Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…

Complex motions for robots are frequently generated by switching among a collection of individual movement primitives. We use this approach to formulate robot motion plans as sequences of primitives to be executed one after the other. When…

Skinning is a popular way to rig and deform characters for animation, to compute reduced-order simulations, and to define features for geometry processing. Methods built on skinning rely on weight functions that distribute the influence of…

It is now possible to reconstruct dynamic human motion and shape from a sparse set of cameras using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) driven by an underlying skeleton. However, a challenge remains to model the deformation of cloth and skin in…

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing an animatable human model from a multi-view video. Some recent works have proposed to decompose a non-rigidly deforming scene into a canonical neural radiance field and a set of…