Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: Katsu Yamane received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from
University of Tokyo in 2002. He is currently a Senior Research
Scientist at Disney Research, Pittsburgh and an Adjunct Associate
Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Prior
to joining Disney, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon
University and an Associate Professor at University of Tokyo. His
research interests include humanoid robot control, character animation,
and biomechanical human modeling.

Abstract: Human motions are stylistic, natural and expressive, and therefore it
seems to be an obvious choice to use human motion capture data for
animating humanoid robots and virtual characters. Unfortunately,
applying motion capture data is not straightforward even for human-like
models, let alone for models whose kinematic and dynamic properties are
significantly different from humans. In this talk, I will describe our
work on applying human motion capture data to three different models:
humanoid robots, non-humanoid characters, and superheroes. These models
highlight different technical elements for motion adaptation, including
dynamic balancing, statistical pose mapping, and momentum-based motion
editing.