Dr. Marcelo Kallmann

The Merced Sun-Star article Giving robots human qualities said

Professors at UC Merced are researching ways to make robots think like us, move like us — and one day, maybe even look like us. Marcelo Kallmann, 36, an assistant professor of computer science at UC Merced’s School of Engineering, is researching ways to enhance the artificial intelligence of computers to include mimicking human-like movements.
 
He refers to those functions as “intelligent motion”.
 
“What I mean by intelligent motion is all the kind of motions that (humans) do so easily,” Kallmann said.

Dr. Marcelo Kallmann is is Assistant Professor and Founding Faculty at the University of California, Merced and adjunct professor to the University of Southern California (USC). He worked on Autonomous Virtual Humans at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), and also at the USC Robotics Lab and at the Virtual Reality Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).
 
Marcelo is currently investigating algorithms for learning and planning complex motions efficiently for a variety of tasks involving communicative gestures, manipulations and locomotion. He is particularly interested in representations of the perceived environment which are suitable for learning and reusing movements. The goal is to achieve constructive and open-ended learning where entirely new motions can emerge.
 
He authored Path Planning in Triangulations, Scalable Solutions for Interactive Virtual Humans that can Manipulate Objects, and Interaction with 3-D Objects, and coauthored Interactive Motion Correction and Object Manipulation, Planning Motions in Motion, Hierarchical Motion Controllers for Real-Time Autonomous Virtual Humans, Motion Capture from Inertial Sensing for Untethered Humanoid Teleoperation, Towards Real Time Virtual Human Life Simulations, and Immersive Vehicle Simulators for Prototyping, Training and Ergonomics. Read his full list of publications!
 
Watch videos related to his paper Planning Collision-Free Reaching Motions for Interactive Object Manipulation and Grasping: two hands, fridge, and relocation. Read his Ph.D. thesis Object Interaction in Real-Time Virtual Environments which he completed in 2001 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL).