Make Way for the Robot Animators! Bringing Professional Animators and AI Programmers Together in the Quest for the Illusion of Life in Robotic Characters

We are looking at new ways of building algorithms for synthesizing and rendering animation in social robots that can keep them as interactive as necessary, while still following on principles and practices used by professional animators. We will be studying the animation process side by side with professional animators in order to understand how these algorithms and tools can be used by animators to achieve animation capable of correctly adapting to the environment and the artificial intelligence that controls the robot. Robotic characters are becoming widespread as useful tools in assistive, entertainment, tutoring and manufacturing applications. This is leading to the need of having better animation built into these robotic systems. Traditional character animation relies on having animators design animations which are then faithfully played back on the character. Now we pose the question: how can we have the animation process integrated with the artificial intelligence agent (AI) that drives the robot? We want the animation to be adaptable to both the agent’s internal state and its external environment, while keeping the quality of the animation in line with what an animator expects. The main question here is not just whether or not the users will like the robot or find it believable; instead, we want to have animators collaborating with the programmers in a way that the robot’s animation during interaction is satisfying to the actual animators. Motivation and Goals Animating an interactive robot is quite different from animating a virtual character. The biggest differences we point out from our experience are the fact that the robot shares the same physical space that humans do, and as such, follow on the same laws of physics. While animating a robot, animators must take into account gravity, inertia, and the actual torques that the robot’s motors can achieve. Because they are physical and can interact with users through various types of interfaces and sensors, robots also seem to lead to a much higher expectation from the users, and appeal more to some interactive non-verbal behaviours like gazing, rapport or proxemics than a virtual character would. Copyright c © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Figure 1: Two example scenarios featuring a touch-based multimedia application, sensors, and different robots. On this issue of breaking out the traditional animation process into one that can be integrated with an AI, we highlight two different types of animation: Pre-designed character animation is when artists design an animation for a specific character topology using professional animation software, such that the animation can then be played back in a character with that same topology; Procedural character animation is when a software algorithm is able to synthesize the character’s animation in real-time, by having some higher-level control software tweaking the parameters of the algorithm. The purpose of our work is to merge both approaches by: 1. Finding out how to build character animation algorithms that can be tweaked by the AI that controls the character during interaction with users and the external physical world; 2. Having these algorithms make use of or blend with predesigned animation; 3. Bringing animation artists into the process of achieving the previous points. Our belief is that robot animation should be supported by principles and practices of professional character animation.