Disney’s New Robotic Stunt Double

Disney’s New Robotic Stunt Double

Disney land has always over the years been known for their contributions to the technology with increasingly impressive versions of their character animatronics. Despite this nobody could have predicted an innovation of the caliber of their new robotic stunt double. This new bot is like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Typically animatronics are not capable of wide movement and can rarely move from their set locations. That’s what makes this newest advancement so impressive.

Disney’s Stuntronics Produces Robotic Stunt Double

The robotic stunt double is part of Disney’s fairly recent Stuntronics project and is made partly from aspects of a previous experiment known as “stickman”. The Stuntronic is a self-automated, self-correcting aerial performer capable of incredible feats of gymnastics. It can make on the go corrections to its movements to ensure success in whatever stunt its performing. It is much more effective even at this station than most human stunt people when it comes to flexibility and adaptability. Along with this, its mechanical nature means it will never get hurt or feel pain, meaning it can do any sort of outrageous things with no fear.

Thrilling Stunts For Park Visitors

This could be extremely revolutionary for Disney’s film industry with Tony Dohi, Principal R&D Imagineer saying “ So what this is about is the realization we came to after seeing where our characters are going on screen” he continued “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. And so that becomes the expectation at our park guests have that our characters are doing all these things on screen”.

So the aim is to make the theme parks feel more authentic and lifelike in terms of imitating the characters they’re designed around. It was not mentioned explicitly,  but for the actual movies that Disney’s studios make these stunt doubles could guarantee perfect and danger-free stunts compared to the many risks taken with human stunt doubles. Imagine if instead of sometimes wonky CGI in the Spiderman movies if a robot could actually do the stunts.

With a massive budget at the division’s disposal, it would not be surprising to see even more incredible achievements in the future. The Stuntronic project has moved fairly quickly proving their proficiency and dedication to projects. Outside of Disney, this could also potentially mean big things on a world stage. The first thing that comes to mind in the pessimistic human brain would have to be how scary it would be to see an incredibly smart and acrobatic robot jumping at you. With all the incredible improvements to these robots taking place all over the world a collective project could quite possibly result in a fully capable super robot, especially with budgets such as Disney’s. Picture Boston Dynamics Atlas’ capabilities at general movement fused with the Stuntronics immense aerodynamics, and it can genuinely be viewed as somewhat scary.

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