  Creating robots with emotional personalities will transform the usability of
robots in the real world. As previous emotive social robots are mostly based on
statically stable robots whose mobility is limited, this paper develops an
animation to real world pipeline that enables dynamic bipedal robots that can
twist, wiggle, and walk to behave with emotions. First, an animation method is
introduced to design emotive motions for the virtual robot character. Second, a
dynamics optimizer is used to convert the animated motion to dynamically
feasible motion. Third, real time standing and walking controllers and an
automaton are developed to bring the virtual character to life. This framework
is deployed on a bipedal robot Cassie and validated in experiments. To the best
of our knowledge, this paper is one of the first to present an animatronic
dynamic legged robot that is able to perform motions with desired emotional
attributes. We term robots that use dynamic motions to convey emotions as
Dynamic Relatable Robotic Characters.
