Disney Research

Soft robots have applications in safe human-robot interactions, manipulation of fragile objects, and locomotion in challenging and unstructured environments. In this paper, we present a computational method for augmenting soft robots with proprioceptive sensing capabilities. Our method automatically computes a minimal stretch-receptive sensor network to user-provided soft robotic designs, which is optimized to perform well under a set of user-specified deformation-force pairs. The sensorized robots are able to reconstruct their full deformation state, under interaction forces. We cast our sensor design as a sub-selection problem, selecting a minimal set of sensors from a large set of fabricable ones which minimizes the error when sensing specified deformation-force pairs. Unique to our approach is the use of an analytical gradient of our reconstruction performance measure with respect to selection variables. We demonstrate our technique on a bending bar and gripper example, illustrating more complex designs with a simulated tentacle.

The usage of deep generative models for image compression has led to impressive performance gains over classical codecs while neural video compression is still in its infancy. Here, we propose an end-to-end, deep generative modeling approach to compress temporal sequences with a focus on video. Our approach builds upon variational autoencoder (VAE) models for sequential data and combines them with recent work on neural image compression.

JUNGLE is an interactive, visual platform for the collaborative manipulation and consumption of nonlinear transmedia stories.

We propose a novel generic shape optimization method for CAD models based on the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM).

We present a system for fast and robust handovers with a robot character, together with a user study investigating the effect of robot speed and reaction time on perceived interaction quality. The system can match and exceed human speeds and confirms that users prefer human-level timing.

We present a light field video synthesis technique that can achieve accurate reconstruction given a low-cost, widebaseline camera rig. Our system called, INDiuM, novelly integrates optical flow with methods for rectification, disparity estimation, and feature extraction, which we then feed to a neural network view synthesis solver with widebaseline capability. A new bi-directional warping approach resolves reprojection ambiguities that would result from either backward or forward warping only. The system and method enables the use of off-the-shelf surveillance camera hardware in a simplified and expedited capture workflow. A thorough analysis of the refinement process and resulting view synthesis accuracy over state of the art is provided.