Soon Disney Land will have humanoid robots flying across stages posing as famous Marvel, Star Wars, or Pixar characters. The kids will never know; they will believe it’s a real superhero, or whichever character it is that they see.
Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development in Los Angeles, California, is developing these latest robots known as ‘stuntbots.’ The stuntbots could also be used in live theatre performances at Walt Disney-owned resorts and themed parks. Autonomous Stuntronics are self-correcting aerial performers able to make on-the-go corrections during a high-flying stunt, to ensure that they land safely.
According to TechCrunch, Walt Disney has made significant advances in the field of animatronics. Animatronics are static, lifelike robots that already entertaining crowds at Disney theme parks and resorts. Now, Disney’s engineers are pushing animatronics and robot engineering to the next level by building humanoid robots designed to perform aerial stunts. These robots can adjust their position in mid-air while holding the perfect superhero flight pose, all with the help of built-in accelerometers, gyroscopes, and laser guiding.
Disney’s associate research scientist, Morgan Pope, said that animatronic robots are neither obviously fake nor entirely realistic. However, once you have one shooting off and flying around, that all goes away. It obviously becomes very realistic at that point.
Pope explained:
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.
Where these robots will end up in Disney is currently unannounced, but most likely, anywhere they put them will be the right place for a superhero. Check out the video below of the robot superhero.
