- [Narrator 1] The stunts we love to watch
in movies like Spider-Man: Homecoming,
usually rely on a mix
of stunt performers,
green screen
and computer generated models.
- [Narrator 2] Stunts like these,
where Spider-Man flies through the air
can be dangerous,
especially if they're being performed live
over, and over, and over again.
But at the new adventures campus
at Disneyland Resorts,
these stunts are being done everyday
by this guy, a robotic acrobat.
- [Narrator 1] It's part of a Centronics technology system
developed by a team of roboticist and engineers.
Wired spoke with Imagineers, Tony Dohi and Morgan Pope
to discover what it took to design,
launch, and catch
the stuntronic acrobat.
[music swells then fades]
- [Narrator 1] While this fine Spider-Man may look human,
it's actually a complex robotic system
covered by a 3D printed shell.
- Ultimately, the two driving design things
for the Stuntronic robot
were this idea
of robustness
and grace.
It also had to communicate
the fluidity of a human performance.
It had to be believable and alive.
- [Tony] Yeah. It had to look like Spider-Man.
- So, Tony and I were working
on kind of parallel paths.
He had this idea for throwing a robot across the room,
and meanwhile, over on the research side,
I was working on how do you control something
as it's free-falling through space.
- [Narrator 2] To tackle the challenge of creating
a totally controllable robotic system
that mimics the uncontrollability of flight,
they started their design with this,
The Brick.
- [Morgan] The idea here was
that we could spin it to the air,
and it had these weights inside that could move.
- [Tony] It didn't look like a character,
but it had all the intelligence in it.
It had sensors,
uh
it knew how high it was from the ground.
- [Narrator 1] Their next prototype
didn't look much like a character either.
- So, this right over here, is our prototype.
- This actually has that bend that's a lot more.
This is how a human shifts inertia, right, kind of do
tuck and do a flip and lay out.
- And so from that, we moved really quickly.
Maybe the next day we started building Stickman.
- [Tony] It's actually a Z-shaped series of linkages.
- [Morgan] It's like the engineering version
of a Lincoln logs or Legos.
And you get this kind of double pendulum,
which is like a classically chaotic system,
which means it's kind of a bear to control,
but it also means you can do really fun stuff.
If you squint at it starts to look like a human.
This is the first time
we could get asymmetric motion, right?
This guy can move this arm
and not this arm,
and do all sorts of like twists and stuff.
- [Narrator 2] Then, they moved to half scale figures.
- [Narrator 1] And finally their series
of full-sized stuntronic robots.
- The weigh about 95 pounds.
- Mhmm
- And their height,
I would say, is
5'9".
- [Morgan] We constructed them out of mainly
3D printed plastic and aluminum,
- [Both] and a lot of screws.
- Yeah, right, a lot of screws.
[transition music]
- So, we started with a 40 foot high throw
- Right.
- Not even that. - Yeah, it was like 40, 45,
which was twice what we were doing inside.
- So we started to, to tune up power on the winch
and we kept throwing this higher and higher
and higher until we pretty much peaked out the winch.
- Yeah, around 65 ft
- Yeah throws about 65 feet high in the air.
- And there was this kind of magical moment where
I think it was it's around 55 feet.
It feels like it shouldn't it have come down by now.
Like, you know, like it's, it feels like it's floating.
That was a cool moment.
Then internally,
the robot uh keeps track of its position
using the same basic sensors that are in your phone
uses an accelerometer and gyroscope.
So the same thing that tells you
if it's portrait or landscape.
- The only external sensor I can say we have
is one that's really more tied into the show control system.
And it's the anemometers
because we really need to be very,
very aware of the wind speeds.
- [Morgan] We took measurements of the weather
at Disneyland for like a year,
so that we can be really conservative
about how the robot flies through the air
and make sure that we always hit the net.
- [Narrator 1] Creating the illusion of Peter Parker,
as Spider-Man flying through the air
was an ongoing design
and engineering challenge.
- Robots are designed to be precise and they're not designed
to, to make mistakes and be clumsy or, or show panic.
- [Morgan] Right.
- So the question is now, how can we capture Spider-Man
out of control flying through the air?
- [Morgan] Oh, that was a really fun challenge
- [Tony] That took,
that just took so many iterations to get that dialed in.
- It's a lot of trying.
When we were indoors, we had a whole motion capture system
set up, so that we could
validate that our sensors were actually giving us precision
to within a few centimeters.
Which is the kind of position we needed
to do what we wanted to do.
So I think as human beings,
we understand like
things spinning in one plane pretty well.
But when you start flipping in 3D space,
things get weird physics wise.
For instance,
if I'm doing a front flip like this,
and I have my arms up,
if I throw my arm down like this,
I'm going to tip a little bit.
But then I'm also out of nowhere,
I'm going to start like twisting around this axis.
Now you've gone from just a straight front flip to
a twisted, slightly tilted, tumbling.
And the, the, the physics you can ride on one line,
it's a very simple equation,
but then what pops out of it is so counterintuitive
and honestly so beautiful.
And I think that's kind of the fun part about how,
you know, moving from
the brick where it was very much in two dimensions
to this, to the more complicated
where you've got cross products of inertia.
You've got this more complicated human shaped object
that can do all these weird things in 3D dynamics.
And that suddenly made it feel really alive.
[music playing]
- [Tony] The catchment system is very, very specific.
So not only do
we have to be able to catch the figure,
decelerate it very quickly,
but that net also has to be robust enough
to do this over and over and over again,
because we don't want to replace it every show.
The net area is only about 10 feet by 10 feet.
- [Morgan] I think 14, which sounds big.
But then when you get on the roof and if you like look from
the position of the robot, 65 feet in the air,
it doesn't feel very big.
So another good reason we don't do this with people.
- And it has a deceleration system.
That's, it's just this beautifully simplistic
in its design.
- [Morgan] Yep.
- [Tony] But it's also very quickly resettable.
The robot was designed
to actually have some breakaway linkages
- Right.
- So that if we
uh land in a funny way,
for instance,
uh we're only gonna break
a 3D printed part
that's designed to snap
so that we don't transfer that impact to the more
delicate or more expensive parts, like the servos.
- That, that actually has been a cool thing.
We've done some pretty violent things to our robots
in the course of testing.
You design it so that if it breaks, it's not a big deal.
It goes all the way back to Stickman.
- We're always thinking
of what the next thing might be.
- [Morgan] I think ultimately we designed this system
with the hopes of it being flexible and adaptable,
and there are so many dynamic characters
in the Disney Pantheon,
and we hope that we can deliver more of them for real.
- [Tony] Centronics isn't a robot,
it's a category of,
of stunt robots.
So, we are
really hoping that we just scratched
the surface with this one
and that we can keep taking it as far as we can.
- Yeah. Yeah. Fingers crossed.
I think it would be really fun to see more.
[music fading]