Walt Disney Imagineering—the research and development arm of the Disney parks—will debut a new robot in its Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong parks. Frozen fans will certainly be excited to see Olaf the snowman stumbling around the World of Frozen area of Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland early next year, but those of us who have always found the icy sidekick unnerving will not be pleased.
Disney’s dedicated an entire episode to Olaf and its history of robots on its Walt Disney Imagineering YouTube channel. Olaf was created inside Disney Research’s Zurich, and is decidedly smaller than the Olaf’s human-sized character that goes to Disney meet and greets. He appears to be just under hip height. It seems like he’ll be wandering Disney aimlessly, cursing parkgoers with his unhinged laugh.
“Our latest Olaf is a fantastic example of representing an animated character as authentically as possible in the physical world—a challenging task because animated characters most often move in non-physical ways,” Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, said in a news release. “For example, to make Olaf’s snowball feet move along his body, we paired state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning with an artistic interface and advances in mechanical design.”
Because Olaf is an animated character—and not inherently a robot, like Star Wars droids—Disney had to make “fundamental additions to our reinforcement learning framework to boost the believability of the character by enabling motion at the limit of hardware,” Laughlin said. So, for instance, Olaf’s body is softer, like snow, and you can pull off his nose.
The Disney engineers in the video said they used reinforcement learning techniques to teach robots like Olaf and other droids how to act like their characters by ‘watching” artist-made animations. They’ve been through a bunch of iterations throughout the years, starting with a small, humanoid robot that’s shown in the YouTube channel being tripped by a stick. The BDX droids are featured heavily in the episode, too, showcasing how Disney made them more autonomous. They’ve got “eyes” and “ears” to compute what’s going on in the world using AI. So, for instance, if a person kneels down in front of a droid, it’ll move its head to look at the person directly. If they stand up, the droid looks up. It also shows the engineers “choreographing” a performance between three droids that gets recorded to be “played back” as a performance at the parks. And they do that by controlling the droids with what looks like Steam Decks. It’s described as “building blocks for the autonomous show.”
Olaf is the next progression of Disney’s robots, but Disney isn’t clear how Olaf will work—whether it’ll need to be partly controlled by a human or not. The “self” in “self-walking robot” seems to imply that it’ll do a lot of the work itself, though.
