Disney engineers showed a cute bipedal robot that imitates body language
Miscellaneous / / October 09, 2023
It's almost like WALL E, but with two legs.
Walt Disney Imagineering presented at the IEEE IROS conference in Detroit an as-yet-unnamed robot that can imitate the movements of various characters. He can stride importantly, like the rooster from Moana, or, for example, show curiosity, like WALL E from the cartoon of the same name.
The robot looks a bit like BD-1 from the 2019 game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. It is a small bipedal mechanism with a thin box head on a long neck. He has a flashlight and a pair of small antennae.
The head is capable of a wide range of articulation, in which much of the individuality is revealed. To make him appear friendlier and more attractive, he was trained to imitate the behavior of dogs. For example, if the robot is interested in something, it tilts its head, and its antennae can move like a dog's ears.
This prototype is part of a long-term project that Disney has been working on for years. The company's engineers are preparing mechanisms that can move based on real animation. This system uses not only the work of the animators themselves, but also machine learning so that some models can be adapted and applied to different robots in a short time.
In other words, if a Disney character has a certain way of walking, then a robot similar to him should reproduce it exactly. This is a kind of body language that is developing and will continue to develop in parallel with the basic stability, maneuverability and adaptation of robots to various moving conditions.
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