[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-82729-en":3,"doc-seo-82729-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":91},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},82729,4398048949847,"Eliana","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/400002536579ef2da7f?_k=1778318612642679267",8,"Research & Report","Invisible Strings: Deriving Puppetry Principles and their Hidden Connections to Robot Behavior Design","Invisible Strings investigates how puppetry principles can close gaps in using theater, dance, and animation for robot nonverbal behavior design. Robotics research often relies on gaze, gesture, and breath, while arts-based theories can miss constraints imposed by real-world physics and embodied interaction. By leveraging puppetry texts and expert puppeteers’ knowledge, the work derives eight puppetry principles, showing how they uniquely complement prior arts-based insights for physically embodied, interactive robot characters.","arXiv :2607 .03289v 1 [ cs .RO] 3 Jul 2026  \nInvisible Strings: Deriving Puppetry Principles and their Hidden Connections to Robot Behavior Design  \nCLAIRE LEWIS, SAWYER COLLINS, and ALYSSA HANSON, Colorado School of Mines, USA JOHANNA SMITH, California Sate University San Bernadino, USA  \nTOM WILLIAMS, Colorado School of Mines, USA  \nWhen designing robots’ nonverbal behaviors, many researchers have turned to arts-based insights, such as Disney’s Animation Principles. Yet, while these principles bear key insights into the design of like-life characters, their application to robot design is inherently limited, in part because animation is not constrained by real-world physics, and in part because animation principles focus on low level animation mechanics and not high-level design considerations for physically embodied, interactive characters. In contrast, little attention has been paid to art forms like puppetry, despite their long history of exploring morphological, behavior, and interaction design of physically embodied, interactive characters. As such, in this work we leverage puppetry texts and practicing puppeteers’ expert knowledge knowledge to derive a set of puppetry principles with key insights for robot design. As we show, these insights go beyond — and uniquely complement — the prior insights provided by theater, dance, and animation.  \nAdditional Key Words and Phrases: design guidelines, robot design, puppeteering  \n1 Introduction  \nRobot designers regularly leverage nonverbal behaviors like gaze and gesture to enable more clear and lifelike communication. For example, designers often use gesture and body language to direct people’s attention, communicate urgency, and increase likability [18, 93, 98] . Similarly, designers use gaze to direct attention, and to enhance team performance [3, 4, 52] . Finally, designers have recently explored the use of breath to signal robots’ animacy and to communicate emotions implicitly [57] . All of these nonverbal cues, if effectively designed, can work together to create a lifelike embodied character.  \nTo design effective nonverbal cues, roboticists have often turned to art forms like theater, dance, and animation, whose practitioners and theorists have developed key theories for encoding and designing nonverbal behaviors in non-robotic contexts. For example, roboticists have leveraged theatrical knowledge on the design and performance of interactions. However, theater-based design rarely focuses on designing specific motions. Similarly, roboticists have leveraged dance knowledge on the design and performance of specific movements [9] . However, dance-based theories are often focused specifically on anthropomorphic actors. Finally, roboticists have leveraged Disney’s 12 Animation Principles [115] to inform the animation of low-level robotic motions [91, 91, 114] . However, animation-based insights often leverage the fact that animations are not constrained by the laws of physics. Accordingly, we argue that while HRI researchers have successfully leveraged key arts-based insights in prior work, the nature of the specific art forms leveraged has led to gaps in their applicability.  \nIn contrast, in this work we consider the often overlooked art form of puppetry, and consider how it might fill the specific gaps left by these other art forms [108] . Puppetry is an art form that bears striking similarity to robotics. Like robotics, puppetry centers the design of specific motions for not-fully anthropomorphic embodied artifacts that are subject to the laws of physics. Moreover, like roboticists, puppeteers must reason carefully about not just behavior design, but also the morphological design necessary to generate specific behaviors, and the interaction design between  \nAuthors’ Contact Information: Claire Lewis, [claire_lewis@mines.edu](claire_lewis@mines.edu); Sawyer Collins, [sawyer.collins@mines.edu](sawyer.collins@mines.edu); Alyssa Hanson, [abhanson@mines.edu](abhanson@mines.edu","cbCaimuWMf0fSQXN","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaimuWMf0fSQXN","pdf",2016082,1,22,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## Non-verbal Communication in Robotics\n# Background\n## Art-Based Insights for Robot Behavior Design\n## Puppetry as a Bridge for Physically Embodied Characters","[{\"question\":\"Why do existing arts-based principles from animation, theater, and dance have limited applicability to robot behavior design?\",\"answer\":\"They often target low-level mechanics and overlook constraints from real-world physics and high-level design for physically embodied, 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