Animated Cassie: A Dynamic Relatable Robotic Character
This work addresses the challenge of creating emotionally expressive robots for improved usability in real-world applications, representing an incremental advance by applying animation techniques to dynamic legged robots.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling dynamic bipedal robots to express emotions through motion, developing an animation-to-real-world pipeline that allows robots like Cassie to perform emotive behaviors such as twisting and wiggling, with validation in experiments.
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 animation to real world pipeline that enables dynamic bipedal robots that can twist, wiggle, and walk to behave with emotions. First, an animation method is introduced to design emotive motions for the virtual robot character. Second, a dynamics optimizer is used to convert the animated motion to dynamically feasible motion. Third, real time standing and walking controllers and an automaton are developed to bring the virtual character to life. This framework is deployed on a bipedal robot Cassie and validated in experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is one of the first to present an animatronic dynamic legged robot that is able to perform motions with desired emotional attributes. We term robots that use dynamic motions to convey emotions as Dynamic Relatable Robotic Characters.