Generalizing Natural Behavior: Retargeting Human or Animal Motion to Robotic Forms

Legged robots, particularly humanoids, represent an emerging technology whose widespread acceptance depends on their ability to perform meaningful tasks at the human cadence in the real world.These systems are inherently complex, and unlocking their full potential requires control strategies that coordinate whole-body motions.These complexities pose significant challenges for current motion control methods, underscoring the need for innovative approaches that extend beyond existing frameworks.Similar to how text data catalyzed progress in natural language processing, motion data from humans and animals holds the potential to usher in a new era of physical intelligence.Yet, unlike abundant and well-structured text corpora, human motion data is sparse, often incomplete, and typically lacks action labels, which limits the direct application of supervised learning techniques.To bridge this gap, recent years have seen the integration of imitation learning with structured simulation-based methods like reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization, which shows promise in generalizing natural behaviors to robotic systems.At the same time, transferring behaviors from simulation to physical hardware has taken significant strides, particularly for specialized policies.These advancements have been primarily fueled by improvements in robotic hardware, physics simulations, and techniques for sim-to-real transfer.As a result, the field of robotics has evolved considerably.Today, robotics is shifting its focus from specialized policies toward broader challenges such as generalization, high-level control, and behavior sequencing, all while continuing efforts to bridge the gap between simulation and reality.This workshop aims to gather experts in 3D human/animal modeling, motion generation algorithms, and robotics to review recent progress and chart the next steps for advancing the field.It will serve as a unique forum where the latest advances in computer graphics, particularly in controlling simulated characters, intersect with cutting-edge developments in robotics, from hardware innovations to sim-to-real transfer.The workshop aims to