Disney has created an impressive autonomous robot capable of doing stunts and serving as a stuntman in shows.
Disney It has kicked in and is investing time and millions of dollars within its Imagineering Research division, which is tasked with creating the next generation of robots for its parks and movies. Come on, they are not Boston Dynamics but the progress they have made is remarkable.
Disney Imagineering has already shown us robots capable of climbing walls, with amazing precision capabilities, that jump on one leg, that will incorporate artificial intelligence and even interactive “squishy and huggable” prototypes. But now we have between us Stuntbot, a robot designed to serve as a stuntman with an impressive ability to perform stunts.
Stuntbot, the bet because no one gets hurt
During years, disney animatronics They have been regarded as the most advanced interactive and animated robots in the world. Today, in the XXI century, these robots have become a bit outdated due to technological advances and new developments from various companies around the world.
One of the disadvantages of animatronics is that they have been located in a fixed position glued to the ground, where the movements were focused on the face, hands and sometimes the body, but they did not move from place, at least autonomously. Disney knows that today’s children (and the occasional adult) expect to find their favorite characters performing all kinds of movements when they visit the parks, so the company had to pull in real actors.
Faced with this, Disney found another problem, since it not only needed the animatronic and the actor, but also to a double, which was in charge of making the action scenes during the shows, with all the risk that this entails. For years, this was not a big problem for Disney, as their animated characters weren’t all that “bold.” The problem came when they became owners of Marvel and Star Wars.
Thanks to this is how Stuntbot was born, the first animatronic robot designed to perform action sequences, as if it were a double. Seeing it in action is quite a show.
The Stuntbot is the first development born from the new division Disney Stuntronics, which in turn depends on Imagineering. The objective is precisely to provide robots that perform dangerous tasks, such as stunts or more complex movements.
As we can see in the video, this first Stuntbot was born as a simple metal bar, which by the way was known as Stickman. With the passage of time, and millions of tests later, gears, sensors and joints were added, so that now in its most recent update it has a humanoid appearance, so in the end it was decided to rename it as Stuntbot.
Stuntbot is an autonomous robot capable of balancing on a rope, performing famous poses of various characters, self-correcting its trajectory in the air, and landing at a designated point. It has a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, as well as an advanced laser detection system that measures distances, range and speed, so its jumps offer a precision never seen before, or that is what Disney says.
The first Stuntbots will debut when ‘Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge’ opens in Disney parks in Anaheim and California in 2019, as well as in new expansions focused on the Marvel universe.
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