Disney Imagineering has created autonomous robot stunt doubles

Posted on July 9th, 2018

Human performers have developed impressive acrobatic techniques over thousands of years of practicing the gymnastic arts. At the same time, robots have started to become more mobile and autonomous, and can begin to imitate these stunts in dramatic and informative ways. This is a simple two degree of freedom robot that uses a gravity-driven pendulum launch and produces a variety of somersaulting stunts. 

The robot uses an IMU and a laser range-finder to estimate its state mid-flight and actuates to change its motion both on and and off the pendulum. 

After more than 50 decades, Disneyland and its sister parks are a showcase for more technically skilful versions of its own”animatronic” characters. First pneumatic and hydraulic, and more lately wholly digital, these characters produce a sense of emotion and life inside attractions and rides, in displays and, progressively, in interactive ways across the parks.The machines they are producing are getting more mobile and active to be able to represent the physical nature of these characters that they depict inside the expanding Disney world class. Along with also a recent addition to the pantheon can alter how characters move across the parks and affect how we think about portable robots in large.That’s done a lot to increase the compelling character of what’s an extremely restricted robot.Traditionally, the most animatronic figures can’t proceed from where they stand or sit alone and are pre-built to exacting display specifications. The design and programming stages of this series are closely linked, so the hero figures are durable and efficient enough to run countless times daily, daily, for ages.

But together with the expanded universe of Disney properties such as increasingly more active and epic figures from the year, it seems sensible that they would wish to research methods of creating the robots which reflect those properties at the parks much more believable and more lively.That is where the Stuntronics job comes in. Constructed from a research experiment named Stickman, that we covered a couple of weeks before, Stuntronics are autonomous, self-correcting airborne actors who produce on-the-go corrections to pinpoint high-flying stunts each moment. Fundamentally robotic stunt people, thus the name.

“What this is all about is the understanding we arrived to after viewing where our personalities are moving on display,” states Dohi,”whether they’re Star Wars personalities, or Pixar personalities, or Marvel personalities or our own cartoon characters, is they’re doing all these things which are really, extremely busy. So that becomes the anticipation our park guests possess our personalities do all those things on display — but in regards to our attractions, what exactly are our animatronic figures doing? We understood we’ve sort of a disconnect .”They created the notion of a stunt double for the ‘hero’ animatronic characters that could take their position in a series or spectacle to do more aggressive maneuvering, substantially in precisely the same manner a double replenishes a delicate and valuable celebrity in a scene that is dangerous.The Stuntronics robot includes onboard accelerometer and gyroscope arrays encouraged by laser range finding. In its existing form, it is humanoid, talking about the dimensions and structure of a celebrity that might readily be envisioned clothed in the costume of, say, among The Incredibles, or even somebody about the Marvel roster. The bot can be slung at the end of a cable to fly through the atmosphere, controlling its pose, turning and centre of mass to not just land airborne tricks correctly, however, to perform them on goal when holding epic poses in midair.​One use of this could be mid-show in an attraction. For relatively static shots, hero animatronics like the Shaman or new figures Imagineering is constantly working on could provide nuanced performances of face and figure. Then, a transition to a scene that requires dramatic, un-fettered action and boom, a Stuntronics double could fly across the space on its own, calculating trajectories and striking poses with its on-board hardware, hitting a target dead on every time. Queue re-set for the next audience.This focus on creating scenarios where animatronics feel more ‘real’ and dynamic is at work in other areas of Imagineering as well, with autonomous rolling robots and — some day — the holy grail of bipedal walking robots. But Stuntronics fills one specific gap in the repertoire of a standard Animatronic figure — the ability to convince you it can be a being of action and dynamism.“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,” says Pope. “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.”

Just like lots of the answers Imagineering comes up with because of its problems, Stuntronics started out as a research endeavour with no actual function. Primarily, a metallic brick with detectors and also the capacity to modify its centre of mass to control its twist to reach a precise orientation in an exact elevation — to’stick the landing’ each moment.In the first BRICK, Disney proceeded on to Stickman, an articulated version of this system that may now more vigorously control the orientation and rotation of the apparatus.”Morgan and I got together and said, perhaps there is something here, we are not certain. But let us poke it at a lot of different directions and find out what’s from it,” states Dohi.However, the Stickman did not stick for long.”And by the time that I was introducing the BRICK in a summit, Tony [Dohi] had helped us create Stickman. The Stickman is what is cool. And I was down in Australia introducing Stickman and that I knew we had been performing the complete Stuntronic back in R&D.”However, it’s been so much pleasure. Each step along the way I believe, this is blowing my head. However, they keep pushing…so it is wonderful to get this challenge.”

You’ve got individuals that are permitted by management and private arrangement to distribute the threads of an issue, even though you’re not entirely sure what’s likely to come from it. The largest companies on Earth have comparable R&D departments set up — although those which produce a habit of disconnecting them by a balance sheet, such as Apple, are few and far between in my experience. Typically, a lot of R&D is tied tightly to some profit/loss spreadsheet which it is hard to saturate something enough to find out what comes of it.The capability to having enormously different specialities such as mathematics, physics, art and layout to have the ability to put thoughts on the table and sift through them and say hello, we’ve got this storytelling difficulty on the one hand and this research endeavour on the opposite. Should we drill down with this a little more, would this serve the goal?”We are set up to do the hazardous stuff which you don’t understand will succeed or not, because you don’t know if there is going to be an immediate application of what you are doing,” states Dohi. “But you only have a hunch there may be something, and they provide us with a very long leash, and they let’s research the possibilities and also the distance around only a notion, which is rather a privilege. It is among the reasons why I like this place.”

It is indeed a bunch of very smart individuals across a wide array of areas that are regulated by a central nervous system of leaders, like Jon Snoddy, the mind of Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, that help connect the dots between the research side and the different regions of Imagineering which handle the parks or even interactive jobs or the electronic branch.There are a market and shortage of self-control to the business that permits exploration without even wastefulness and curtails the pursuit of items not in service into the narrative. In my time researching the joys of Imagineering, I have frequently found that there’s a considerable disconnect between how intriguing the procedure is and how well the business conveys the cleverness of its solutions.Even the Disney Research white newspapers are infinitely fascinating to individuals interested in emerging technology. However, the factors of integration between the research and the technical applications from the parks frequently stay unexplored. However, they are becoming better at comprehending when they have got something that they believe is killer and considering better ways to convey this to the entire world.Indeed, close to the end of the conversation, Dohi says he has come up with a good sound bite and that I have made him give me his very best pitch.“Among our aims of Stuntronics would be to determine if we could jump across the uncanny valley”Not bad.