Disney Robot Stuntronics: Revolutionizing Stunt Performances
Updated May 2023
Meet Disney’s latest creation, a groundbreaking robotic stuntman designed to outperform traditional stunt doubles. Crafted by Disney’s Imagineering Research and Development lab, this dexterous robot takes on daring flips 60 feet in the air, challenging the need for human counterparts. Equipped with lasers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, it precisely tracks and adjusts its midair position, mirroring the actions of a real stuntman. Disney dubs this innovative technology “Stuntronics.”
Dohi, a spokesperson, sheds light on the motivation behind Stuntronics: “Our characters on screen, be they from Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel, or our animations, engage in highly active feats. This sets the expectation for our park guests. However, our animatronic figures in attractions lack that dynamic quality. We recognized a disconnect that needed addressing.”
Disney Robot started as a much simpler robot called Stickman
Before it was transformed into the 90-pound humanoid. Disney has not said when we might be able to see these acrobatic bots acting on film. Fully Story
“So often our robots are in the uncanny valley where you got a lot of function, but it still doesn’t look quite right. And I think here the opposite is true,” says Pope. “When you’re flying through the air, you can have a little bit of function and you can produce a lot of stuff that looks pretty good, because of this really neat physics opportunity — you’ve got these beautiful kinds of parabolas and sine waves that just kind of fall out of rotating and spinning through the air in ways that are hard for people to predict, but that look fantastic.”
“We’re set up to do the really high-risk stuff that you don’t know is going to be successful or not, because you don’t know if there’s going to be a direct application of what you’re doing,” says Dohi. “But you just have a hunch that there might be something there, and they give us a long leash, and they let us explore the possibilities and the space around just an idea, which is really quite a privilege. It’s one of the reasons why I love this place.” Full Story
Disney Robot Is Not Alone: Boston Dynamics has a robot called Atlas
It is a remarkable creation that has been designed to carry out search and rescue missions. When asked about making robots perform tasks such as jumping, Saunders explained that it helps his team face many practical problems. Tasks like jumping require a lot of coordination between the upper body, legs, and feet. His videos exhibit the robot’s hands and arms moving to stabilize itself better and its legs wobbling when it lands on soft ground, which is far different from laboratory conditions.
According to a spokesperson from Boston Dynamics, one unique thing they do with their robots is to put them out in the real world, as opposed to keeping them in a lab environment. The robots have to autonomously navigate the terrain in these real-world environments. In a video, a robot was seen walking up a set of stone steps in a park-like setting using only simple joystick commands such as “go forward” or “go left or right.” Everything else was controlled autonomously by the robot’s control system. Full Story
Now look at these fantastic robots.
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