Motion Reconstruction and Imitation from Monocular Videos

Motion Reconstruction and Imitation from Monocular Videos

We present SLoMo: a first-of-its-kind framework for transferring skilled motions from casually captured “in- the-wild” video footage of humans and animals to legged robots. SLoMo works in three stages: 1) synthesize a physically plausible reconstructed key-point trajectory from monocular videos; 2) optimize a dynamically feasible reference trajectory for the robot offline that includes body and foot motion, as well as a contact sequence that closely tracks the key points; 3) track the reference trajectory online using a general-purpose model-predictive controller on robot hardware. Traditional motion imitation for legged motor skills often requires expert animators, collaborative demonstrations, and/or expensive motion-capture equipment, all of which limits scalability. Instead, SLoMo only relies on easy-to-obtain videos, readily available in online repositories such as YouTube. It converts videos into motion primitives that can be executed reliably by real-world robots. We demonstrate our approach by transferring the motions of cats, dogs, and humans to example robots including a quadruped (on hardware) and a humanoid (in simulation).

Check our websites:

Related Papers

2024
May
PDF SLoMo: A General System for Legged Robot Motion Imitation from Casual Videos
John Zhang, Shuo Yang, Gengshan Yang, Arun Bishop, Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Deva Ramanan, and Zac Manchester
Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) & International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
2023
October
PDF PPR: Physically Plausible Reconstruction from Monocular Videos
Gengshan Yang, Shuo Yang, John Zhang, Zac Manchester, and Deva Ramanan
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). Paris, France.

People

John Zhang
Optimization and Contact Simulation
Shuo Yang
Tesla Optimus Humanoid
Arun Bishop
Contact-rich Optimization and Control
Swaminathan Gurumurthy
Deep Equilibrium Models
Zac Manchester
Assistant Professor
Last updated: 2023-08-26