Disney Research's social robot at IROS 2023

A short post covering IROS 2023

One of the major conferences in robotics: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems was held in Detroit last week. One of the big draws of IROS is the cool robots that are demonstrated over there. One of the most popular robots shown was a child-size social robot shown in the keynote by Disney Research. This cute robot combines 3D printed hardware, animation and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to be able to design and program a bipedal walking character capable of unique gaits and traits. This robot has 4 degrees of freedom for the head and 5 degrees of freedom for the body. RL is used to convert an animators work to a series of movements which express the emotive intent of the animator. Another cool aspect about this robot is that it took a mere several months for researchers to bring this robot up.

There is a very cool demo of this robot.

There is a very detailed article on this in IEEE Spectrum with very cool pictures.

There is also another video of this robot that is trending on Twitter. Hope you liked the videos. Disney is the master of creating animated movies, and I look forward to see how they blend these cute robots in their other works of art.

If you attended IROS 2023, and can share any notes from this robot or other interesting things you gathered from IROS 2023, please post in the comments.