New Disney technology has robots doing acrobatic tricks that will soon be introduced to big Disney theme parks including Disney world and Disneyland.
Their engineers created to two processes for designing the robots:
-“Imagineering” (engineering process)
-“Stuntronics” (movement during acrobatic tricks)
Nicknamed “stickmen”, these robots can determine whether to do a single or
double backflip. It can even perform “Marvel superhero”
like stunts…as in, Disney’s future Marvel Comic based rides will replace human stuntmen/women with 24/7 operating robots.
Tony Dohi – Principal R&D Imagineer at Disney:
“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.”
To perform “stuntronics”, each robot has an accelerometer to monitor that calculates both gravity and at the same time, it measures the velocity as its movement accelerates/decelerates while flying through the air.
They also are equipped with multiple gyroscope sensors that use laser range finders to “stick the landing”.
Originally designed as just a stick man figures but engineers
up-graded the object to have more human-like features.
Tony Dohi – Principal R&D Imagineer at Disney:
“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.”
Morgan Pope – Associate Research Scientist at Disney:
“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.”
“Come with me if you want to live.”
Morgan Pope – Associate Research Scientist at Disney:
“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.”
Love it or Hate it…this is the Future of good ol’ Mickey Mouse.
-Rick
