But at the new Adventures campus at Disneyland resorts, these stunts are being done every day.

Buy this guy a robotic acrobat.

It's part of a central onyx technology system developed by a team of roboticists and engineers wired spoke with imagineers, Tony dough.

He and morgan poke to discover what it took to design.

Launch and catch the sun Tronic acrobat.

Well this fine Spiderman may look human.

It's actually a complex robotic system covered by a three D.

Printed shell.

Ultimately the two driving design things for the sun tronic robot where this idea of robustness and grace.

It also had to communicate the fluidity of human performance.

It had to be believable and alive.

Yeah I 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 un controllability of flight.

They started 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, It knew how high it was from the ground there.

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 human shifts inertia, right?

Kind of do it would tuck and do a flip and layout.

And so from that we were we moved really quickly.

Like maybe the next day we started building stick man.

It's actually a Z shaped series of linkages.

It's like the engineering version of 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 a symmetric motion, right?

This guy can move this arm and not this arm and do all sorts of like twists and stuff.

Then they moved to half scale figures.

And finally, their series of full sized electronic robots, they weigh about £95 and their height, I would say is 59.

We constructed them out of mainly three printed plastic and aluminum and a lot of screws.

Yeah, right.

A lot of screws.

Mm hmm.

So we started with a 40 ft high throw.

Maybe not even that, it was like 40, which was twice what we were doing inside.

So we started to tune up the power on the winch.

And we kept throwing this higher and higher and higher until We pretty much peaked out.

The winch.

Around 65 throws are about 65 ft high in the air.

And there's this kind of magical moment where I think it's around 55 ft.

It feels like it shouldn't have come down by now.

Like, you know like it feels like it's floating.

That was a cool moment.

And internally the robot keeps track of its position using the same basic sensors that are in your phone uses an accelerometer and 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 be clumsy or show panic.

Right?

So the question is now how can we capture spider man out of control flying through the air.

And that was a really fun challenge that took, that just took so many iterations to get 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 three D.

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 gonna 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 physics you can write 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 three D.

Dynamics.

Um, and that suddenly made it feel really alive.

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 internet area is only about 10 ft by 10 ft I think 14, which sounds big.

But then when you get on the roof and if you look from the position of the robot 65 ft 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 re setubal.

The robot was designed to actually have some breakaway linkages so that if we uh land in a funny way for instance, uh we're only going to break a three D.

Printed part that's designed to snap so that we don't transfer that impact to the more delicate and more expensive parts.

Like the service that is 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 centro nick isn't a robot, it's a category 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, yep, fingers crossed.

I think there's I think it'll be really fun to see more.

Mhm.