In a new YouTube video from CrunchLabs, engineer Mark Rober takes a tour of the Walt Disney Imagineering lab and gets an up-close look at several recent Imagineering projects. As a part of his tour, Rober gets a more details of the development of the stuntronic figure from Disney California Adventure.
Stuntronic Development
In the middle of his tour, Rober visits the Robots section of the Research and Development building. He meets an Imagineer named Tony, who explains a little more about the development of the stuntronic. Officially, the animatronic is called an Aerial Stunt Robot and is currently used for the Spider Man stunt show in Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure.
In the beginning of the development process, the robot began as a simple pair of sticks connected with a henge and some sensors.
As development progressed, the stick slowly gained additional hinges and a more humanoid shape. The addition of more henges and features allowed the Imagineers to gain better control of the robot and slowly start programming it to strike various poses.
Tony adds that the animatronic can now perform stunts that would be difficult for a human stunt actor to replicate. In the case of the launch for the Spider-Man animatronic, Tony says the robot can hold on to a rope and launch itself despite facing 10g of force.
Tony also commented the process was “a lot of trail and error” and that the test robot was probably thrown “1,000 times.”
Imagineering Tour
Rober also meets Imagineer Lanny Smoot, who was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame last year. Rober previews the “HoloTile floor” shown off by Disney last year and explains how it could possibly be implemented for filmmaking or VR gaming.
If you want to see the complete video of Rober’s tour of Imagineering, it is available now on the CrunchLabs YouTube channel.
We also have a video of the complete Spider-Man Stuntronic show from Avengers Campus, which was recently altered to include fewer human performers.
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