Disney Research is working on a new method to create life-like movements in a robot.
New Disney Robot
This week, robot enthusiast Lukas Ziegler shared a new video of a Disney robot dancing. In the video, embedded below, a free-standing humanoid figure moves its arms, legs, and feet to tap, spin, and moonwalk.
Disney Research is solving difficulties in achieving life-like movement with robots thanks to their new Robot Motion Diffusion Model (RobotMDM). They shared a paper about this method a few months ago. The abstract reads:
Recent advancements in generative motion models have achieved remarkable results, enabling the synthesis of lifelike human motions from textual descriptions. These kinematic approaches, while visually appealing, often produce motions that fail to adhere to physical constraints, resulting in artifacts that impede real-world deployment. To address this issue, we introduce a novel method that integrates kinematic generative models with physics based character control. Our approach begins by training a reward surrogate to predict the performance of the downstream non-differentiable control task, offering an efficient and differentiable loss function. This reward model is then employed to fine-tune a baseline generative model, ensuring that the generated motions are not only diverse but also physically plausible for real-world scenarios. The outcome of our processing is the Robot Motion Diffusion Model (RobotMDM), a text-conditioned kinematic diffusion model that interfaces with a reinforcement learning-based tracking controller. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on a challenging humanoid robot, confirming its practical utility and robustness in dynamic environments.
Disney Research also shared the following video comparing MDM and PhysDiff models with their RobotMDM. The video features computer-generated and real examples with the same robot.
Read the full paper — Robot Motion Diffusion Model: Motion Generation for Robotic Characters.
Disney has made advancements with several different kinds of robots in recent years. After Disney Research unveiled bipedal walking robots in 2023, they introduced the technology as roaming droids in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland. In 2021, they showcased “Project Exo,” which allows for larger-than-life characters. This was utilized in Disney California Adventure for a limited-time Hulk meet and greet. Also in 2021, they shared video of a free-roaming Groot animatronic. Last year, Imagineers demonstrated a Judy Hopps-like skating robot at SXSW. The Spider-Man Stuntronic robot performs daily at Avengers Campus.
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