Disney's New Bipedal Robot BD Shows Eye-Catching Personality

Submitted by tatwood on Tue, 10/10/2023 - 20:22

Disney is getting very good at combining the art of character animation with the science of bipedal robotics, and has developed a process that takes expressive character animations and rolls them into a robot's motion schema. Unveiled at the IEEE IROS conference in Detroit last week, this new, unnamed robot is clearly based on the BD-1 designed for 2019's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order video game, developed by Respawn Entertainment. Like BD-1, it's got a fairly compact, boxy little body, with a pair of stumpy, bird-like reverse legs, and a flattish head with eyes, a temple-mounted flashlight and a little pair of antennae. The head is capable of a wide range of articulation, and here's where a lot of the personality comes in. For more information, visit Newatlas.com.