""Our latest Olaf is a fantastic example of representing an animated character as authentically as possible in the physical world-a challenging task because animated characters most often move in non-physical ways," Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, said in a news release . "For example, to make Olaf's snowball feet move along his body, we paired state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning with an artistic interface and advances in mechanical design.""
"Because Olaf is an animated character-and not inherently a robot, like Star Wars droids-Disney had to make "fundamental additions to our reinforcement learning framework to boost the believability of the character by enabling motion at the limit of hardware," Laughlin said. So, for instance, Olaf's body is softer, like snow, and you can pull off his nose."
Disney Imagineering will debut a new Olaf robot in the World of Frozen areas at Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland early next year. The robot was created by Disney Research Zurich and is significantly smaller than the human-sized meet-and-greet Olaf, appearing at about hip height. Engineers combined state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning with an artistic interface and advances in mechanical design to reproduce animated, non-physical motions, such as snowball feet moving along the body. Fundamental additions to the reinforcement learning framework were made to push motion to hardware limits and increase believability. The physical design includes a softer, snow-like body and a removable nose. Engineers trained the system by having robots 'watch' artist-made animations and iterated through multiple versions over the years.
Read at Kotaku
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