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.