Dr. Saltz, a digital media and theater educator, and Mike, a programmer, present ROBOTIS’s Darwin animation tools at the ICRA 2012 challenge, including a planned commedia dell’arte performance with robot character Zebzob.
Dr. Saltz describes a need for expressive robot animation tools that acting and directing students could use without programming experience. Mike introduces Tell Darwin, software that sends human-readable commands wirelessly over UDP from Max/MSP to the Darwin-OP. It provides access to servo positions, the CM-730 sensors and LEDs, audio and video streams, walking functions, and operating system commands.
Darwin Animator lets users control all 20 servos, pose the robot by disabling selected servos, and save poses as snapshots. Users can transition between poses with a slider or timed duration, including a 500-millisecond transition, and shape transitions with motion curves. They can also record puppeted movements and layer recordings for more complex motion.
Darwin can speak text using the Linux eSpeak program or play audio files through its speaker. Animator can bob the robot’s head in time with audio, and sequences can combine poses, motions, eye and forehead colors, speech, sound effects, video, lighting cues, and pauses. The resulting cues can be triggered with buttons or keyboard keys.
Dr. Saltz describes a planned Saint Paul production inspired by commedia dell’arte, with a live performer playing opposite Darwin as Zebzob. The robot is being trained to portray traditional physical characters, including Pantalone, a grouchy miser, and Pulcinella, a zany servant. The demonstration also shows Zebzob improvising a pratfall.
Briefs summarise talks and interviews; timestamps open the video at that moment. Claims in a talk are the speaker's own.
Michael Chang, a PhD researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, presents his work at the GRASP Lab Spring 2023 SFI on neural abstractions for modeling and controlling systems, and discusses future human-computer interfaces at DeepMind.
Karen Liu, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, discusses physics-based human motion simulation and its use in robotics at an MIT Robotics talk.
Dennis Hong, robotics professor and founding director at Virginia Tech, explains why humanoid robots suit human environments and how his lab developed soccer-playing robots and firefighting prototypes.
A ROBOTIS presenter discusses a Darwin humanoid robot that plays Dance Dance Revolution and the vision-processing and motion constraints behind the demonstration.
Alex, role and affiliation unknown, presents the Darwin Drives project with King at an ICRA 2012 challenge; they show a humanoid robot operating an iRobot Create and discuss possible uses for humanoid-driven vehicles.
Students from Purdue University describe their team’s Darwin-OP robotics project at an ICRA 2012 challenge, explaining its sensor-based reactions and demonstrating them.
