Meet Olaf – the frozen robot who may be the future of Disney Parks

You know Olaf. before Demon hunters in kpopbefore evil The movies, it was Disney Frozen That blasted show tunes like “Let It Go” and “Into the Unknown” into our lives. My little girls loved playing those tunes.

So when I met Olaf, Disney’s fictional robot, I kept thinking: I can’t wait for my kids to meet him too.

It’s a really weird idea, because this Olaf isn’t “he” and can’t carry on the conversation. Why do I keep thinking “I met him” when he’s pretty much a remote-controlled doll operated remotely by a hand-held Steam Deck gaming device?

I think the answer is that Olaf — who is coming to Disneyland Paris on March 26 and to Hong Kong Disneyland this summer — is the rare robot to cross the globe. Uncanny Valley As long as it keeps moving. This is because Disney animators helped him Train himselfwhere 100,000 virtual copies of the actual Olaf robot were stuck into an Nvidia-powered simulation and rewarded for precise on-screen movements. It only took two days to train Olaf using an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU.

“This is definitely the future of how we build robot characters,” says Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president of research and development at Disney Imagineering. Edge. He says reinforcement learning is the “real breakthrough” that could allow Disney to fill entire lands full of interactive characters, as entire robots can now be built in months rather than years.

And while Disney Imagineering has done some of this With her star wars Robots before“That was ‘robots being robots,'” says Laughlin. “This is our first animated character that we’ve brought to life.”

To be perfectly clear, Olaf is not artificially intelligent. The 35-inch-tall, 33-pound robot may have 25 actuators and three computers including an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX and a Raspberry Pi, but it doesn’t speak for itself. Pre-recorded lines are played From Olaf voice actor Josh Gad While making moving movements.

While Olaf blinks independently, he cannot “see” you in order to look at you – this requires the operator to tap the joystick. The Steam Deck’s other joystick tells Olaf where to walk, and the player can scroll across the touchpad to quickly access page after page of conversation options. In the early demo, it wasn’t enough to keep a conversation going; A quick “Of course!” or “Sure!” It was often all I got.

But when Olaf moves, I can’t take my eyes off him, and I automatically find myself writing “him” over and over again. He bobs around so convincingly! When I can’t quite place my finger WhyMoritz Bacher, director of the Disney Research Laboratory, explains much of it in eight words: “The eyes go first, the body follows.” We automatically assume that we are looking at a living being, because the eyes are mentally controlled.

(It also doesn’t hurt that Olaf’s four-way stretch costume, built atop foam “snowballs,” sparkles like fresh snow when light shines through it. Olaf’s carrots, sticks, and buttons are all magnetic, so they can be easily reattached or even intentionally detached as a gag.)

While Disney is famous for protecting its intellectual property, it views its robot research differently. Last March, it partnered with Nvidia and Google DeepMind for the release Newton’s physics engine As an open source project managed by the Linux Foundation; And now Disney Research is also contributing chimneyIt’s a simulation tool she developed to train “very complex mechanical groups” like Olaf and other upcoming robots, including a simple thermodynamic model to prevent joints from overheating prematurely.

The team says Olaf was a challenge because robots traditionally don’t have large, heavy heads resting on small necks. It puts a lot of pressure on this joint, making it vulnerable to overheating. Olaf’s clomp-clomp-clomp walk was a loud challenge to solve as well. But in the reinforcement learning simulation, Disney was able to simply reward 100,000 virtual Olafs who moved without the joint overheating or making too much noise. “It’s like telling my six-year-old to stop running around the house: Can you be a little calmer? “That’s pretty much what we had to do for Olaf,” Laughlin says.

Butcher told me that these tools are designed to interface with tools that animators already use, including Maya, so that animators can create movements that target emotions, allowing the physics simulation to do the work of figuring out what the robots can actually do.

I have to admit, this illusion pretty much falls apart when Olaf stops moving, and Disney Research hasn’t said when they might make these robots truly autonomous. It seems that this technology is not up to Disney standards yet. “Plausible autonomy” is the goal: “It has to be something you believe is true,” Bacher says.

But it won’t always be a human with the Steam Deck at the controls either. Olaf could be part of timed shows, which tie directly into Disney’s live entertainment choreography systems, Laughlin says, and this is one of the first ways he will appear at Disneyland Paris. He will perform on a boat in the lake in front of the castle. “We built a dummy boat in our R&D lab to simulate the large amount of rocking back and forth in this boat, and Olaf did an amazing job of staying afloat,” says Laughlin. “He’s got his sea legs.”

Laughlin suggests that these shows may become more interesting, as Disney creates more robots. “You can expect to see more robots from the franchises together so they can interact.”

“The real power will come from Olaf interacting with the characters he knows and loves. Not just the performers, but also other characters that we couldn’t bring to life without the robots,” he hints.

Disney Research published an eight-page white paper on how Olaf was created, including some of the exact ingredients and formulas it used. You can read it below.