Advanced Animation Engine for User-Interface Robots

This paper describes an improved animation system for user-interface robots. The animation system is based on the animation engine presented by van Breemen, A.J.N. (2004), and uses animation channels for playing and blending multiple animations concurrently. The presented improvement is twofold. First, this paper describes an extension to the computational structure of an animation channel. A fading mechanism is added to an animation channel in order to realize a smooth transition from one animation to another. Secondly, this paper explains how to setup animations for a user-interface robot application. A technique based on behavior mode animations and action animations is described for this. The animation system has been implemented and tested using the Philips iCat Research Platform