Nutty-based Robot Animation -- Principles and Practices

Abstract

Robot animation is a new form of character animation that extends the traditional process by allowing the animated motion to become more interactive and adaptable during interaction with users in real-world settings. This paper reviews how this new type of character animation has evolved and been shaped from character animation principles and practices. We outline some new paradigms that aim at allowing character animators to become robot animators, and to properly take part in the development of social robots. One such paradigm consists of the 12 principles of robot animation, which describes general concepts that both animators and robot developers should consider in order to properly understand each other. We also introduce the concept of Kinematronics, for specifying the controllable and programmable expressive abilities of robots, and the Nutty Workflow and Pipeline. The Nutty Pipeline introduces the concept of the Programmable Robot Animation Engine, which allows to generate, compose and blend various types of animation sources into a final, interaction-enabled motion that can be rendered on robots in real-time during real-world interactions. The Nutty Motion Filter is described and exemplified as a technique that allows an open-loop motion controller to apply physical limits to the motion while still allowing to tweak the shape and expressivity of the resulting motion. Additionally, we describe some types of tools that can be developed and integrated into Nutty-based workflows and pipelines, which allow animation artists to perform an integral part of the expressive behaviour development within social robots, and thus to evolve from standard (3D) character animators, towards a full-stack type of robot animators.