If you visit a Disney Theme Park, one of the coolest (or most terrifying, depending on who you ask) parts of the attractions is the animatronics. From the singing animals of Splash Mountain to the swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean, they are a signature part of the experience. But now, Disney is taking animatronics to a whole new level – with acrobatic stunt robots.
Disney has always been the master of marketing and user experience. They do everything to ensure the best possible experience for park guests and maintain consistency with the movies and the park experience. A large part of that is due to constant innovations like this one.
The project started out with a research experiment called Stickman, a robot that is basically one long limb. Stickman can tuck and fold, performing aerial somersaults thanks to a laser range finder and a combination gyroscope/accelerometer, which calculate its position in-flight and adjust its positioning accordingly.
Stickman expanded into Stuntronics – a more human-shaped version of Stickman:
Stuntronics are autonomous, self-correcting aerial performers that make on-the-go corrections to nail high-flying stunts every time. Basically robotic stuntpeople, hence the name…
In its current form, it’s humanoid, taking on the size and shape of a performer that could easily be imagined clothed in the costume of, say, one of The Incredibles, or someone on the Marvel roster. The bot is able to be slung from the end of a wire to fly through the air, controlling its pose, rotation and center of mass to not only land aerial tricks correctly but to do them on target while holding heroic poses in midair.
Tony Dohi, Principle R&D Imagineer and Morgan Pope, Associate Research Scientist at Disney, said about the project:
So what this is about is the realization we came to after seeing where our characters are going on screen, whether they be Star Wars characters, or Pixar characters, or Marvel characters or our own animation characters, is that they’re doing all these things that are really, really active.
And so that becomes the expectation our park guests have that our characters are doing all these things on screen — but when it comes to our attractions, what are our animatronic figures doing? We realized we have kind of a disconnect here.
The Stuntronics robots can be used as a more maneuverable “stunt double” in an attraction – creating a more dynamic scene than one simply featuring a stationary animatronic. It will be exciting to see how Disney integrates this new technology into their parks. No doubt it will generate new excitement about the Disney Parks experience, and draw even more annual visitors.