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Nancy Pollard

Post Doctoral Fellow,
College of Computing


Nancy Pollard is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where she performed research on grasp planning for articulated robot hands. Her current work at the Animation Lab is focused on creating physically realistic simulations of human motion. Current projects include:

Adapting simulated behaviors for new characters: A great deal of research at the Animation Lab has focused on the development of control strategies for simulating human motion. One focus of current work is to build into these control strategies the ability to automatically adapt to changes in the physical properties of a simulated character. This will make it easier for a researcher or animator to adjust a simulation to meet their goals. For example, it should be possible to replace a male runner with a female runner, or to replace an adult with a child, and have the control parameters automatically adapt to the resulting changes in mass and mass distribution.
Simulation of human manipulation tasks: It is extremely difficult to create realistic animations of tasks involving interaction between a character and its environment. The character must make contact with the environment in a way that appears graceful, and interaction forces must appear correct. A second ongoing research project is to combine an analysis of required task forces with biomechanical information about human motion create an animated basketball player capable of catching, throwing, and dribbling a basketball. The goal of this project is a character that can automatically generate motion that appears natural and realistic, and matches a high-level script that may be specified by a coach or an animator.


Selected Publications

  • Pollard, N. S., Hodgins, J. K., 1998. Adapting Behaviors to New Environments, Characters, and Tasks . Yale Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems. ( Acrobat format ).

  • Hodgins, J. K. and Pollard, N. S., 1997. Adapting Simulated Behaviors For New Characters, SIGGRAPH 97 Proceedings, Los Angeles, CA. (Acrobat format)
  • Pollard, N. S., Quality Preserving Algorithms for Grasp Synthesis from Prototypes, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation.
  • Pollard, N. S., 1997. Parallel Algorithms for Synthesis of Whole-Hand Grasps,Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Albuquerque, NM.
  • Pollard, N. S., 1996. Synthesizing Grasps from Generalized Prototypes, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Minneapolis, MN.
  • Pollard, N. S., 1994. Parallel Methods for Synthesizing Whole-Hand Grasps from Generalized Prototypes, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report AI-TR 1464.
  • Pollard, N. S., 1993. Planning Grasps for a Robot Hand in the Presence of Obstacles, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Atlanta, GA.

  • Contact information:

    Nancy S. Pollard
    Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center
    College of Computing
    801 Atlantic Drive
    Georgia Institute of Technology
    Atlanta, GA, 30332-0280
    (404) 894-7243
    E-mail :
    nsp@cc.gatech.edu