the stunts we love to watch in movies
like spiderman homecoming usually rely
on a mix of stunt performers green
screen and computer generated models
stunts like these where spiderman 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
every day by this guy a robotic acrobat
it's part of a centronics technology
system developed by a team of
roboticists and engineers
wired spoke with imagineers tony dohey
and morgan pogue to discover what it
took to design launch and catch the
centronic acrobat
[Music]
while this fine spider-man may look
human it's actually a complex robotic
system covered by a 3d printed shell
ultimately the 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 yeah it
had to look like spider-man so tony and
i were working on kind of parallel paths
you know 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 to tackle the
challenge of creating a totally
controllable robotic system that mimics
the uncontrollability of flight they
start at their design with this
the brick the idea here was that we
could spin it through the air and it had
these weights inside that could move it
didn't look like a character but it had
all the intelligence in it had sensors
uh it knew how high it was from the
ground 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 were we moved
really quickly like maybe the next day
we started building a stick man it's
actually a z-shaped series of linkages
it's like the engineering version of uh
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 out 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 then they move to half-scale
figures and finally their series of
full-size stuntronic robots they weigh
about 95 pounds
and their height i would say is
five nine we constructed them out of uh
mainly uh 3d printed plastic and
aluminum and a lot of screws yeah right
a lot of screws
[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
uh
tune up the power on the winch and we
kept throwing this higher and higher and
higher until we pretty much peeked out
the winch
yeah around 65 yeah those are about 65
feet high in the air and there's this
kind of magical moment where
i think it's around 55 feet it feels
like it shouldn't it have come down by
now like know like 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 in a 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 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
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 and be clumsy or or
show panic right so
the question is now how can we capture
spider-man out of control flying through
the air well that was a really fun
challenge that took that just took so
many iterations when we were in doors 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 physics you can
write on one line it's a very simple
equation but then what pops out of it is
so counter-intuitive 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]
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 well 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 it's
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
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 going to 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 the servos that
is 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 stick man
we're always thinking of what the next
thing might be 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
centronics isn't a robot it's a category
of of
stunt robots so we are really hoping
that we just scratch the surface with
this one and that we can keep taking it
as far as we can yeah
fingers crossed i think there's i think
it'll be really fun to see more
[Music]