I think we found a really fun spot in robotics
that hasn't been explored very much before.
It's a good day to throw a robot, I'd say.
I think so.
[Morgan] So, right now, we're doing a couple of things.
One is just the-- Every morning you gotta get him up
and make sure he can do his calisthenics.
Make sure he's feeling fit and fierce.
Yeah, head's coming up.
[roboticist 2] Head's coming up.
Good morning.
I grew up super, like, super bookish, super nerdy.
I grew up in a little town in rural Utah.
I got a really good ACT score, and someone said,
"You could probably go to Harvard if you wanted to."
Then I looked up the ACT scores like, "Maybe."
And then I got in.
I ran into somebody who was doing his PhD program.
I was like, "So, what do you do?"
And he's like, "Well, you know, I build robots, I 3-D print these robots,
and then I use them to test algorithms
for how robots could collaborate with each other."
And I was like, "Wow, that's super cool. That's awesome.
It's amazing that you get the opportunity to do that stuff."
I was like, "Oh, there's no reason I can't do that."
So this is the pose that I'm thinking of modifying
so he's kinda got a little bit of tension
when he's actually in the, like, in the blocks.
My role at Disney is as a Research and Development Imagineer.
And so, my job is to look at what technologies are available and also think,
"What is the new technology that we could make
that would allow us to do something that hasn't been done before in the world?"
Since I started at Disney, my main focus has been this project called Stuntronics,
which, at first, wasn't something that was especially well-defined.
We just had this idea of,
"How can we control things while they're spinning through the air?"
Parks right now, you come to them and you see all of our characters
who you're used to seeing doing amazing action sequences.
What we'd like to do is get these characters off the ground and moving.
The vision is, "Can we deliver these big action beats?"
Previously, they've only expected to have those delivered digitally, right?
Like the magic of CGI.
It would be wonderful to imagine that as a real tactile experience.
What we'd really love, at the end of the day,
is for people to be like, "How did they do that?"
These robots, they don't look good close-up.
They're built to last and to drop from 65 feet in the air.
It's always been the idea
that we would have some kind of a hero performer up front,
kind of leading into the show, and then, somehow, change out
and do this really amazing thing.
The really difficult problem is trying to get an acrobatic robot
to fly through the air and do all the cool things you want it to do.
So in order to help solve that problem,
we need to look beyond what we can see with the human eye.
So we have a bunch of high-speed cameras set up.
We also have the robot who's keeping track of servo positions,
where its arm is at every time,
his rotation and acceleration and velocity.
Now, if you take all that data and you look at it all at once after-the-fact,
you can kinda start to tease apart,
"Okay, what are the little variations that are producing the effects
that I either want or don't want to see?"
So, I'm just looking at stuff like, "Is he tilting from side to side?
Has he got a little bit of a degree or two of twist?"
When you're a robotics researcher,
you're touching everything at the beginning phase.
You gotta write a little code, make a little circuit,
you gotta build something mechanically.
And so that was super fun
because when you have a little bit of all those skill sets,
what you can make is something that's new.
So, these are our first three, like, kind of, full-scale figures
when we started to think, "Could we actually scale this up to person-size?"
So the first, which we then added one joint to,
that was just to give us an idea of, "Can we throw something?
Can we kinda tuck a little bit and get an acceleration?"
Turned out you could.
So we moved on from this beautiful thing
to something that was actually made of metal.
This guy, he can fold in two places. We threw this one a lot.
Learned a lot about the physics
of how you actually throw something through the air.
This is our first, admittedly fairly crude, human-form robot.
We liked this one. He was a good performer.
These prototypes, even though they're really simple,
they were super important for our development process.
You knew we were onto something good when this three-stick thing hit the ground
and I was like, "Oh!" Like, I felt bad for it.
So even a crude prototype can reveal something like that.
So, as a roboticist, I find that super exciting
because now we can create the illusion of life
in a way that's really unique and new.
I don't know, I was thinking maybe the torso's kicked back more or something.
-[roboticist 2] So, more of an arch? -More of an arch.
Those are nice. Arched back.
[Morgan] We can control, okay, when do you see this robot?
Where is it coming from? What is it landing on?
How far away are the people? And what's the story that's framing it?
I can build something that's a new robot to the world
because I'm in a place where I'm telling stories.
And then I wrap a story around it,
and suddenly, it's even more awesome than it would otherwise be.
My favorite film of the Walt Disney Company
is actually our first feature-length one, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Walt was relentless in his drive to make animation come from what it had been
to being something that could be beautiful and moving and still funny.
And he employed new techniques, really talented people,
impressive technical innovations to create that
and also, though, just this driving vision of like,
"Let's do something that nobody thinks can be done."
I think that's something that, hopefully, lets people see
that robotics can do these amazing things,
even if they're not practical yet in the real world.
And I hope we're continuing that legacy in projects like Stuntronics.
It's nice to come to a place
where your job is to do something that's never been done before
and that people haven't seen and that excites people.
And so your job is to do something magical.