Designing custom animations with Anki Vector

The makers of Anki Vector (now owned by Digital Dream Labs) put an extraordinary effort in building animations. Animations were what…

The makers of Anki Vector (now owned by Digital Dream Labs) put an extraordinary effort in building animations. Animations were what brought Vector to life. This article describes how designers coded in Vector’s animations using Maya. Vector has 981 inbuilt animations in him. You can find a full list of animations here.

But what if you wanted to build your own animation. Something unique and different from what Vector usually does. Luckily, the Vector SDK allows you to create new custom animations by using the asynchronous mode. You can build any permutations and combinations of the existing 981 animations.

Here a small snippet on how to do it. First create an asynchronous connection to Vector, which allows you to ask Vector to operate many commands in parallel.

with anki_vector.AsyncRobot() as robot:

Now, let us examine the following code.

_ANIMATION1 = ‘anim_dancebeat_getout_01’_ANIMATION2 = ‘anim_fistbump_requestoncelong_01’

animation1_without_lift = robot.anim.play_animation(_ANIMATION1…