From what I’ve seen of humanoid robotics, there’s a fairly substantial divide between what folks in the research space traditionally call robotics, and something like animatronics, which tends to be much more character-driven.

There’s plenty of technology embodied in animatronic robotics, but usually under some fairly significant constraints—like, they’re not autonomously interactive, or they’re stapled to the floor and tethered for power, things like that. And there are reasons for doing it this way: namely, dynamic untethered humanoid robots are already super hard, so why would anyone stress themselves out even more by trying to make them into an interactive character at the same time? That would be crazy!

At Walt Disney Imagineering, which is apparently full of crazy people, they’ve spent the last three years working on Project Kiwi: a dynamic untethered humanoid robot that’s an interactive character at the same time. We asked them (among other things) just how they managed to stuff all of the stuff they needed to stuff into that costume, and how they expect to enable children (of all ages) to interact with the robot safely.