Behind the skill-building process
“Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators’ experience and social intuition,” Disney Research says. “In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate operator data.”
To guide the robot, a human operator controlled it remotely, using their own skills and gut feelings to guide its behavior in real-time, helping it learn how to respond naturally in a variety of social situations. The operator further engaged with it during its interactions with people, recording how it responded whenever someone gave instructions, moved, or reacted.