Disney Research has developed ReActor, a method for turning human motion into movements that differently proportioned robots can actually perform. Instead of adapting an animation first and training a robot afterwards, it optimises both the reference movement and the robot's controller together in a physics simulation.
The team demonstrated the method in simulation and on physical hardware, including transferring human movements to a four-legged robot. Using a small set of corresponding body points, it adjusts the motion to the robot's shape while avoiding problems such as sliding feet, self-collisions and impossible poses. The work comes from Disney's Zurich robotics group and was presented at SIGGRAPH 2026.