STUNTRONICS
BRINGING HEROES TO LIFE
Heroes don’t travel like average people. They have fantastic vehicles, innovative equipment and super-human capabilities. Sure, sometimes they might choose to walk from point A to point B. But other times, they fly.
Imagineers developed “Stuntronics” to enable that superhuman flight through the thoughtful and innovative application of technology. This project combines advanced robotics with the exploration of untethered dynamic movement to create realistic aerial stunts that would be humanly impossible. That means when you watch the Stuntronics figure soar through the air, you’ll have a hard time believing your eyes.
When heroes fly, they do so with both style and expertise. The Stuntronics figure is no exception. Onboard sensing equips the figure to perform a variety of combinations of flips, twists and poses with repeatability and precision. Quintuple backward somersault with a tucked landing? No problem. Any hero would approve.
Angular Momentum and Motion Control
But heroes aren’t usually born, they’re made. The notion of stunt-double animatronics started with attempts to control the landing of a launched figure. Simultaneously, scientists at Disney Research were working on harnessing the law of conservation of angular momentum to achieve extremely precise aerial motion control.
From Screen to Reality
Fate (and a whole lot of dedicated iteration) brought the two efforts together. The teams created the Stuntronics platform to allow broad new possibilities for realizing a wide range of dynamic characters, and to bring high-action stunts from the reel world into the real world.