Disney Just Developed The Most Adorable Walking Robot
Step aside BB-8, this robot’s bipedal
A portly, orange-tawny blob-man jaunts across the screen monitor on two legs, arms and head oddly stationary.
The animation depicts a project out of Disney Research, an R&D arm of the entertainment giant Walt Disney Company DIS -0.74% that collaborates with academia. As the creature ambles and wobbles, it looks like a chocolate covered Pillsbury Doughboy sporting a beer belly. (Lay off those carbs, Doughboy! Hee hee.)
“Here, we develop a bipedal robot that is designed after an animation character, and generate a character-like walking motion for the robot,” the researchers declare in their paper, which they presented on Tuesday at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. “Creating robots that embody animation characters in the real world is highly demanded in the entertainment industry because such robots would allow people to physically interact with characters that they have only seen in films or TV.”