At the Crossroads: Blurring the Lines between Animated and Real Life Personal Robots
The vision of the personal robot has generally been shaped by human perceptions of robots through media and animation. The movie industry has produced animated robot movies for generation across genres with great successes while the advancement in AI is narrowing the gap between fiction and reality.
To animate, and the related words, animation, animated and animator all derive from the Latin verb, animare, which means ‘to give life to'. In the context of robotics, this involves the design and programming of attributes in order to create the illusion of life. Anthropomorphism, the suspension of disbelief, aesthetics, observation, storytelling, performance, articulation of personality through movement and gesture, and the physiological and psychological nature of character are all aspects of animation that animators deal with on a daily basis. In the meantime, researchers have been working relentlessly in the pursuit of bringing human-like capabilities to machines through AI.
In this workshop we would like to explore the principals and practice of animators drawing in from their experience that delivered us robot characters we come to love and adore. Their skills together with the techniques of robotics can contribute immensely in giving ‘the illusion of life’ to personal robots and assist in enhancing human-robot interaction experience.