Disney Imagineering’s latest robot looks like a real-life Star Wars droid

Disney Imagineering, the entertainment giant’s research and development arm, has the talent to create technologically advanced robots, like this surreal Na’vi shaman at Disney World. But its latest development might be its most adorable yet.

The robot is primarily 3D printed and was developed within a year by a team at Disney Research in Zurich, led by research scientist Moritz Becher. “Most roboticists are focused on making bipedal robots walk reliably,” Disney research scientist Morgan Pope said in a statement. IEEE spectrum. “At Disney, that may not be enough. Our robots can strut, jump, sneak, trot, and meander to convey the emotion we need. You may need to.”

In addition to excellent walking and balance abilities, this robot also has very Demonstrates expressiveness without sacrificing movement function. Its two antennae wiggle like cat ears, and its head moves up, down, around, and tilts to mimic emotions through body language.

“Animation tools generally don’t have physics built into them,” Bächer explains. “That makes it difficult for artists to design animations that work in the real world.” Disney designed its new robotics platform to be “hardware agnostic,” allowing developers to design animations that work in the real world. We made it possible to apply the same principles to characters in The animation-inspired pipeline developed by Disney Research should also significantly reduce the time needed to train robots to perform new behaviors, with Boettcher predicting that Disney will be able to develop new robot characters in a few years rather than a few years. The company claims to be able to develop it within a few months.

Or adorable, despite temporarily resembling Wally Star Wars Droids, this experimental preview isn’t going to be staggering to your local Disney park. The company has previously unveiled similar bipedal concept robots that actually resemble characters like Groot and Judy Hopps. Still, it’s interesting to see how far this technology has advanced in recent years, and if movement training like animation can be easily applied to other concepts, it’s interesting to see how far actual Disney animatronics can roam around Disneyland. It may not be long before we can walk around. Just flying in the sky.