Sergey Levine's research on guided policy search (using techniques such as hidden markov models to animate, in real-time, the movement of a bipedal or quadripedal character). An example:

Sergey Levine, Jovan Popović. Physically Plausible Simulation for Character Animation. SCA 2012: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/papers/quasiphysical.pdf