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Real-time character animation in dynamic environments requires the generation of plausible upper-body movements regardless of the nature of the environment, including non-rigid obstacles such as vegetation. We propose a flexible model for…
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…
Physical interaction between humans and robots can help robots learn to perform complex tasks. The robot arm gains information by observing how the human kinesthetically guides it throughout the task. While prior works focus on how the…
What breathes life into an embodied agent or avatar? While body motions such as facial expressions, speech and gestures have been well studied, relatively little attention has been applied to subtle changes due to underlying physiology. We…
Robot-assisted dressing has the potential to significantly improve the lives of individuals with mobility impairments. To ensure an effective and comfortable dressing experience, the robot must be able to handle challenging deformable…
When walking on loose terrains, possibly covered with vegetation, the ground and grass should deform, but the character's gait should also change accordingly. We propose a method for modeling such two-ways interactions in real-time. We…
Scaling action-controllable world models is limited by the scarcity of action labels. While latent action learning promises to extract control interfaces from unlabeled video, learned latents often fail to transfer across contexts: they…
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.…
Legged robots have achieved impressive feats in dynamic locomotion in challenging unstructured terrain. However, in entertainment applications, the design and control of these robots face additional challenges in appealing to human…
Traditional character animation specializes in characters with a rigidly articulated skeleton and a bipedal/quadripedal morphology. This assumption simplifies many aspects for designing physically based animations, like locomotion, but…
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…
Wearable robots are designed to be worn on the human body. Taking advantage of their physical form, various applications for wearable robots are being considered. This study proposes a wearable robot worn on the abdomen and a new…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
We have recently seen great progress in building photorealistic animatable full-body codec avatars, but generating high-fidelity animation of clothing is still difficult. To address these difficulties, we propose a method to build an…
With the increasing use of assistive robots in rehabilitation and assisted mobility of human patients, there has been a need for a deeper understanding of human-robot interactions particularly through simulations, allowing an understanding…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important…
This paper introduces FlipWalker, a novel underactuated robot locomotion system inspired by Jacob's Ladder illusion toy, designed to traverse challenging terrains where wheeled robots often struggle. Like the Jacob's Ladder toy, FlipWalker…
Pneumatically-actuated anthropomorphic robots with high degrees of freedom (DOF) offer significant potential for physical human-robot interaction. However, precise control of pneumatic actuators is challenging due to their inherent…
Creating robots with emotional personalities will transform the usability of robots in the real world. As previous emotive social robots are mostly based on statically stable robots whose mobility is limited, this paper develops an…