Disney Research shared a new video about autonomous human-robot interaction featuring the “Star Wars” BDX droids.
Autonomous BDX Droids
The video is to accompany a paper about the autonomous technology Disney Research has developed for the BDX droids to interact with guests in unique ways that show off their personalities and moods (happy, sad, angry, shy).
The first step of the process is data collection, with a human operating the robot while a motion capture system records the interaction. The diffusion-based framework then learns to imitate the interactions so the robot can recreate them autonomously.
Disney Research also successfully applied the system to a different robot — the two-legged walking robot they shared a preview of last year.
Here is Disney Research’s description of the experiment:
Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators’ experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate operator data. Our model is trained on a dataset of human-robot interactions, where an expert operator is asked to vary the interactions and mood of the robot, while the operator commands as well as the pose of the human and robot are recorded. Our approach learns to predict continuous operator commands through a diffusion process and discrete commands through a classifier, all unified within a single transformer architecture. We evaluate the resulting model in simulation and with a user study on the real system. We show that our method enables simple autonomous human-robot interactions that are comparable to the expert-operator baseline, and that users can recognize the different robot moods as generated by our model. Finally, we demonstrate a zero-shot transfer of our trained model onto a different robotic platform with the same operator interface.
See the results in the video below.
The BDX droids debuted at Disneyland in October 2023 with a playtest in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. In 2024, they made more appearances for a limited time as part of Season of the Force. This year, they will begin appearances at Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Walt Disney World. The droids will make their on-screen debut in “The Mandalorian & Grogu,” in theaters on May 22, 2026. They earned the 2025 Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement – Technical Innovation. Disney recently shared how they updated the droids for new environments.
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