Robotics & R&D Services

Robotics technologies have reached a level where integration of aesthetics and engineering has value for both entertainment and practical applications. The combination will likely be a core factor in a number of exciting development paths.

Having worked with various types of robotics over the years, I have a deep professional interest in helping to develop a representational language that bridges automation and aesthetic control.

Let's talk.

Primary Service Categories


Creature Overlay Creative Direction

Performance Creative Direction

Mobility/Aesthetic Language Development

Motion Generation Pipeline Aesthetic Direction

Animatronic Augmentation Creative Direction

Human Expression Aesthetic Direction

Interactive Performance Design

General R&D Creative Support

Development Focus: Mobility/Aesthetic Motion Language



On the Game Animation page of this site I labeled this approach to animation control as 'Behavioral Animation'. Although applications in the Game and Film industry are somewhat different, the underlying concepts and objectives are the same - to represent performance animation in a form that is compatible with automation without losing effective animation editing.

My interest in this subject began a little over 20 years ago as I was supporting an entertainment project that included a character that was both able to walk and had traditional animatronic character performance features. A big takeaway from that project was that the mobility processing and character performance playback were essentially fighting each other - both had to be de-tuned significantly to get the overall system to behave.

This seemed like a fundamental hurdle to overcome in order to make significant progress in 'hybrid' robotics - whether the term 'hybrid' applies to the convergence of industrial robotics and entertainment, or mobility control with character animation. In the years since, I've focused mostly on theme park animatronics and game development, but have been looking for an opportunity to pursue a solution to this 'two-brain' problem.

While amazing advancements have been made since, and there are many examples of mobile robots moving in aesthetically beautiful and interesting ways, my impression is that actual integration of those two processes continues to be an issue - and an opportunity. I expect that not having fully adressed how to efficiently integrate aesthetic and automated data generation and processing still impedes development advancement in certain areas. I would love to help create a path...


Why Use a Creative Director with an Animatronic Background?
Certain problem sets require collaboration between art and technology. I believe that some avenues of robotic development truly need either an aesthetic component and/or elements of human expression to be successful. Even outside the realm of entertainment, many robotic applications that involve interaction with humans will need sensitivity in motion expression, sensing or both that have some basis in being able to effectively model organic movement. Some of those applications can rely fully on human input for feedback but others are likely to need to do internal processing related to human motion, and some of the skill character animators develop may be useful. The trick, or one trick, is figuring out how to quantify and translate aesthetic and organic motion in a way that is useful.

As an animatronic animator, design director and development lead, this class of problem-solving is my bread and butter. My normal professional environment includes working with electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and a wide variety of technical specialists to find innovative solutions to challenging technically-constrained problems. Deconstructing and reconstructing human and animal motion as both an animator and a system-level designer in the way I have been for the last few decades is uncommon, and I believe directly applicable to this particular development space.