The Glove Puppet Robot: X-puppet

Abstract

The glove puppet is a traditional art in Taiwan. The master puppeteer manipulates the glove puppets and brings each animated puppet character to life. In this work, we attempt to robotize the glove puppet (called X-puppet) along with three types of manipulation interface including a motion editor, a data glove and a motion capture system. The motion editor is a higher level puppet motion composer that creates and combines sequences of control in a timely fashion. The special designed data glove uses a minimum number of sensors to achieve puppet manipulation. It measures the gesture data and maps to the motion of X-puppet in real-time. The motion capture system can extract the puppet's motion from the video and then control the X-puppet to simulate the action. The whole system represents an effort to give this traditional art a new style of performance.