Disney Research Automates Clockwork Robotics

 Robotics  

Teams at Disney Research have created a pair of software packages that brings us one step closer to the rapid design and manufacture of customized robots that can sense and interact with their environments to carry out complex tasks.

Achieving a desired motion in an animated physical character, whether it be a small toy or a full-sized figure, demands highly specialized engineering skills. But research teams at Disney Research have created a pair of software packages that can open the design process to people with a broader spectrum of skills and provide more creative choices.

One set of software tools can take a drawing of an articulated character and produce a type of animation that pre-dates video and film – gear-driven mechanical characters, such as a dancing clock, a galloping horse or a Sisyphean character pushing a heavy load.

The other set takes digital characters that are deformable rather than articulated, such as jelly monsters, plants and jiggling buildings, and helps transform them into elastic figures that can simulate the movements of their virtual forebears. In both instances, the design pipelines take advantage of rapid manufacturing methods, such as 3D printing, to fabricate the physical characters.

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“Translating animated characters to the real world is an extremely difficult task, whether you are building a mechanical character such as a wind-up duck or something that has only existed in the virtual world, such as a dancing Eiffel Tower,” said Bernd Bickel, research scientist at Disney Research, Zürich.

“It’s a process that has always required expert designers and engineers, but our new software tools could open the process to non-experts while expanding the creative choices available to all designers.”

The two research projects involved investigators from Disney Research, Zürich, Disney Research, Boston, ETH Zürich and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Both teams presented their results at ACM SIGGRAPH 2013, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, this month.

The researchers demonstrated the versatility of their software pipeline by designing ten animated characters and manufacturing seven of them. Design took less than a half hour in each case.

“Our characters are currently restricted to cyclic motions,” said Stelian Coros, an associate research scientist at Disney Research, Zürich. “However, our research brings us one step closer to the rapid design and manufacture of customized robots that can sense and interact with their environments to carry out complex tasks.”

The creation of deformable characters presents a different set of problems since by their very nature these characters lack articulation. As input, the design system begins with a 3D representation of the figure in its neutral state as well as a set of target shapes representing the desired deformations. The user can then select actuation points in the figure or, particularly when the character lacks any apparent articulation structure, the system can suggest a number of actuators and their locations.

For the researchers many exciting avenues for future work remain. First, the quality of the motions they have generated directly depends on the types of mechanisms that are available for use. Although they were able to generate a range of compelling examples, the types of mechanisms in their library ultimately limits the range of possible motions. In the future, they plan to investigate methods that automatically extract these building blocks from existing mechanical assemblies.


SOURCE  Disney Research

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