Looking for a deep dive into the tech behind Disney's new Olaf robot? Look no further.
Disney Research Hub, the R&D arm of Walt Disney Imagineering, has published a research paper about the development of its new walking Audio Animatronic. First shown to the press last month in Paris, this Olaf is sized to the character in the Frozen films - a fully articulate, walking, blinking, talking animatronic that's knee-high to a human being.
You can read the paper here: Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World. Credited to David Müller, Espen Knoop, Dario Mylonopoulos, Agon Serifi, Michael A. Hopkins, Ruben Grandia, Moritz Bächer, the paper's abstract reads:
Animated characters often move in non-physical ways and have proportions that are far from a typical walking robot. This provides an ideal platform for innovation in both mechanical design and stylized motion control. In this paper, we bring Olaf to life in the physical world, relying on reinforcement learning guided by animation references for control. To create the illusion of Olaf's feet moving along his body, we hide two asymmetric legs under a soft foam skirt. To fit actuators inside the character, we use spherical and planar linkages in the arms, mouth, and eyes. Because the walk cycle results in harsh contact sounds, we introduce additional rewards that noticeably reduce impact noise. The large head, driven by small actuators in the character's slim neck, creates a risk of overheating, amplified by the costume. To keep actuators from overheating, we feed temperature values as additional inputs to policies, introducing new rewards to keep them within bounds. We validate the efficacy of our modeling in simulation and on hardware, demonstrating an unmatched level of believability for a costumed robotic character.
And here is a look inside Olaf, from the paper:
It all comes together in this video, just posted by Disney Research Hub:
You can see Olaf in person inside the World of Frozen lands at Hong Kong Disneyland and at Disney Adventure World at Disneyland Paris, when that land opens March 29.
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