Disney’s amazing bipedal robot Groot looks like Asimo discovered cosplay

“This robot will someday bring Groot and other characters to life”

“He walks, he waves, he probably falls over in a strong breeze.”

There's a new adorable robot in town, and this one may one day convince you that your favorite Disney character is real. Disney’s R&D labs, commonly known as its Imagineering team, does some extremely impressive and expressive things with robots. It’s made mechanical stunt doubles, lifelike alien Na’vi, and, uh, this skinless weirdo. But the company’s latest creation looks like it quite literally walked out of a Disney movie. Codenamed ‘Project Kiwi’, an in-development robotics platform under Imagineering ,the result of more than three years of work, is a small robot that can move and act on its own and take the form of many different characters — including, Baby Groot.

With Project Kiwi, Imagineering set out to create a robotic actor that could one day interact with Disney theme parks guests and make them feel like they're face-to-face with their favorite characters.When the team started work on the project, there weren't any robots up to that task, so they began making their own. “Project KIWI started about three years ago to figure out how we can bring our smaller characters to life at their actual scale in authentic ways,” R&D Imagineer Principal Scott LaValley says.

Features of Kiwi:

The majority of Project Kiwi's components are custom-made, and it includes some clever design features. For instance, it has a hollow skeleton that allows circulating air to cool its motors and actuators.

One upcoming area of focus is a new set of actuators that will make the robot better equipped to handle sudden interactions, such as a kid running up to hug it, that could topple it over. The team is also working on a new sensor suite that will allow Kiwi to better understand the world and identify human faces. Battery life is another area where the robot could do better. The current model can go about 45 minutes on a single charge.

All of that to say, you can safely wait to plan that next trip to Disney World to finally watch your favourite disney characters come out of your imagination into real life and interacting with you.

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