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When I saw this headline I thought it was a joke.  Um no!  And in typical Disney style, even the robot itself is cute!!

 

 

Disney Builds An Adorable Robot To Etch Massive Pictures Onto The Beach
Posted yesterday

by Greg Kumparak (@grg)

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Look — I love my job. But damn do the folks at Disney’s research labs have a fun looking gig.

 

We’ve seen them build systems that let them 3D print impossible spinning tops, software to turn 3D models into massive parade balloons, and solutions for doing motion capture outdoors with nothing but a few GoPros.

 

Now they’re building robots that can draw sprawling pictures across the beach.

 

The robot — aptly called “Beachbot” — works by dragging a set of pins through the sand, sort of like a rake. Each pin is individually raisable, allowing the bot to draw lines of varying thicknesses. More pins down = thicker lines drawn.

http://youtu.be/eBRrQBPtdak

 

 

The artist behind the robot starts a canvas by setting down poles, which the robot uses as markers to finely calculate its position. At that point, the robot can be passed an image file to draw automatically, or the artists can steer it manually.

 

The Beachbot moves on a set of large, soft wheels that Disney has dubbed “balloon wheels”, allowing it to move across the sand without leaving tracks or screwing up whatever it’s drawn previously.

 

Why? A) Because why not. and B ) It doesn’t require much thinking to come up with practical uses for this, even just within the realm of Disney. Disney has beach resorts. People would flip out to wake up in the morning and see their favorite characters drawn in the sand outside of their room — and by lunch, high tide would come in and wash it away, prepping the canvas for a new drawing the next day.

 

This project, like a good number of Disney Research’s projects, was built in collaboration with Swiss engineering school ETH Zürich.

 

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http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/09/disney-builds-an-adorable-robot-to-etch-massive-pictures-onto-the-beach/

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  • 6 months later...

The BeachBot has made it's way to the Contemporary resort!  From the Disney Parks Blog...

 

 

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An autonomous “entertainment” robot that can create large scale sand art called Beachbot recently visited Walt Disney World Resort and amazed guests at Disney’s Contemporary Resort by drawing a giant portrait of Walt Disney.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjtMd7yzHig

 

Disney Research Zurich teamed up with a group of undergraduate students from a Swiss engineering school to build the Beachbot robot from scratch. The team wanted to do something nobody has ever done before and create a machine that could make spectacular art alongside beachgoers.

 

“This is a new kind of area really, which is entertainment robots – that’s what Beachbot is,” Paul Beardsley, principal research scientist at Disney Research Zurich said. “It could be that you go to your local beach and look over and you see – presto, there’s a drawing being made by a robot.”

 

The students considered different designs when creating Beachbot and ultimately decided to make it in the shape of a turtle and then added a rake mechanism to carve the designs into the sand. Smart software is used to transform images into the art and control Beachbot’s movement, according to the project’s site.

 

Beardsley said Beachbot can make many different types of drawings but one of the things it’s really good at is drawing face images. The robot created earlier images on the beaches of the North Sea before visiting the Walt Disney World Resort.

 

Disney Research Zurich is part of a network of labs that make new technologies for the company.

 

http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2015/08/robot-creates-giant-sand-portrait-of-walt-disney/

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