Animatronics and robots are as essential to the DNA of Disney as delightfully immersive experiences, so it makes sense that the latest creations to go viral are Star Wars BDX Droids.
These robots are not like the rest, though – BDX Droids are incredibly cute, and adorable robots that take a piece of the Star Wars universe and move it into the real world.
The BDX Droids have been on a world tour recently. A few weeks back, they appeared at the Disney Experience SXSW 2025 panel, and a few days ago, they were special guests at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 conference. Before that, they’ve wandered around Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and even hit the high seas on the Disney Wish cruise ship.
“We only build technology in the interest of storytelling,” explained Moritz Bächer, the Associate Lab Director of Disney’s Zurich-based robotics team, to TechRadar. It’s harkening back to what Disney Imagineering, Disney Research, and Disney Live Entertainment push every day; it’s all about creating an immersive experience that pushes joy.
The BDX Droids took less than a year to go from concept to fully themed droids
But how did the BDX Droids come to be? Bächer explained, “The BDX Droids took less than a year to go from concept to fully themed droids that we play-tested at the park.”
These robots were developed and built by a team of eight that “worked on the mechanical design, the artistic input [courtesy of a full-time animator], and the reinforcement learning.”
Reinforcement learning is the idea that through machine learning on high-powered computers, these digital models learn by interacting within this digital world. This is done by placing agents or, in this case, the digital models in different environments and seeing how they react and interact.
Disney’s approach is unique, though.
Disney robot magic
“We basically take animation as an input and make sure that our robots know how to best follow these inputs,” Bächer said.“They learn to not only walk, but to follow the artistic provided motion that differentiates us from the rest of the world.”
In other words, reinforcement learning teaches the droids how to move within the style you’d expect for the storyline.
The bots be-bopping with excitement over meeting you or getting a compliment, walking around like a duckling, or getting angry when they have to go away – it’s the robot’s performance at the current limit of the hardware.
Four actuators in the head and neck and five in each leg power a single BDX Droid, plus sensors, LEDs, and cameras. There are two computers, specifically Nvidia Jetson computers, as well.
“It’s just good to have good hardware on board,” said Bächer, adding the chips are futureproofed and can handle the learnings from the simulations, which act as instructions on the BDX Droids.
To push past these limits to power next-generation characters, Bächer shared, “we’re thrilled to join forces with Google DeepMind and Nvidia to build a simulation framework that speaks to many applications, including what we care about most – bringing new or next-generation robotic characters to life.”
That comes into force as the Newton Platform, which is essentially a simulation and has nothing to do with autonomy. And that’s a big difference between the BDX Droids and the other robots that we’ve seen.
“On the autonomy side, our solutions have to look very different from what the rest of the industry is looking for. With all that we do, our creative vision and artists are at the center of things and are in control,” explained Bächer. The robots need to behave according to the creative direction and deliver the right performance at the right time, something that, by Disney’s reckoning, can’t be replicated by pure AI.
“So at some point in time joysticks are not going to be good enough”
Bächer’s view of autonomy isn’t a complete takeover but one that extends what the team is already doing. “So think of a two joystick controller that we actually use to operate our BDX Droids at the moment. If you have more complex characters, then you also need to control the arms at the same time, so at some point in time joysticks are not going to be good enough.” The solution in Bächer’s eye is using autonomy to make these interactions more meaningful and easy enough to produce with a single operator.
With a humanoid character, noted Bächer, you’ll have too many things to control, so a sensor could be employed to automatically have a robot wave after the head is moved toward a guest at the park. This means one joystick movement accomplishes more than just moving the robot.
“So completely autonomous solutions are not what we’re necessarily after, rather ones that augment what we can do as a mini creative director or operator in our parks,” said Bächer.
And there is some autonomy already with the BDX Droids; antennas will move at random times, the eyes will blink, and with emotions after being triggered, courtesy of show functions.
The BDX Droids have already traversed Galaxy Edge in California and the high-seas on the Disney Wish, but they’re also set to go global with appearances at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios at Galaxy’s Edge, Disneyland Paris, and Tokyo Disney Resort later in 2025. And Bächer’s team, which has grown since the original group of eight, had to prepare them.
Thinking about Disney Wish, I was curious how the BDX Droids account for the natural rocking motion of a ship, but Bächer shared that with balancing, “no matter what the operator does, these robots learn to balance.”
“We not only simulate flat terrain and uneven terrain, but we also push these robots in the simulation with random forces in all directions that are applied to the pelvis into the two feet,” explained Bächer.
To prepare for the Florida sun, the BDX Droids swapped 3D printed components to milled ones, better-suited to handle the heat. Additionally, in conjunction with Disney Live Entertainment, new content has been added to the BDX Droids repertoire.
It’s important to remember that Disney has decades of experience with animatronics and each one is “more complex than anything that you’ve seen on the robotics market, especially when it comes to humanoids,” said Bächer. Further, Disney has built expert simulators that can help create and ultimately predict these movements.
Bächer summed it up this way: “It gives you lots of degrees of freedom as a mechanical engineer to build systems that fulfill our character requirements and the mechanical performance that we need.” And that’s Disney’s contribution to the collaboration with Nvidia and Google – “you basically have everyone who has expertise in simulators that are actively used by industry on one team.”
He teased it’ll help Disney build its next-generation characters.
Building character
Further, it’s a leap for building robots and animatronics as you’re not limited by what you can physically make and test. Bächer said in the future, “we’ll do character development in simulation only before you actually manufacture anything.”
It is not an easy feat, though. The “Iron Man figure at Disneyland Paris has over 150 individually moving components,” explained Bächer. “So, over the years, we’ve been building simulators that can scale to that complexity level.” Locking in those generic mechanisms and building these simulators allows them to manipulate them in various ways to build characters.
Even so, the tech isn’t meant to be seen. “What we’re actually excited about is that you don’t see the technology any longer. The ultimate goal is that we can hide the complexity of these systems from our creatives and artists, so that they can actually focus on the artistic or creative aspects of designing a character or a show, and so on,” explained Bächer.
“You don’t build technology for the sake of technology”
“You don’t build technology for the sake of technology or build functional robots that do tasks, we build Disney technology to create next-generation characters there immersing you in a world so that you don’t see the mechanical systems any longer, you see just a believable robotic character,” shared Bächer.
That’s certainly exciting for what’s to come, but in the short term the BDX Droids are certainly showstoppers. Now, I haven’t seen them in person myself – though that day will eventually arrive – but it’s all about memorable interactions for guests. The droids are adorable, quirky, animated, and vocal in a way that feels authentically Star Wars and can be adjusted on the fly via the operator to create a unique moment.
Bächer shared that the BDX Droids were also used to enhance lands, showing up in a garage next to some starspeeders at Galaxy’s Edge. And beyond the current mini shows or parading around Galaxy’s Edge, the world is basically the BDX Droids oyster in that they can be trained through reinforcement to deliver the performance that Disney cooks up.
So, who knows, the next time you walk around a Disney Park, you might be approached by a BDX Droid – potentially Besh, Grek, Oskar, and Red. So, no, it’s not named Blue. You might be allowed to give it a bop, share something exciting, or even see how it reacts to you.
In a world with many dystopian robots, Disney’s classic approach is about an engaging and joyful experience, and that’s what the BDX Droids accomplish. However, it’s also setting up Imagineering and Disney Experiences for the future:
“It’s important that this is a platform. We use modular hardware components that we understand well in software,” explained Bächer. He added that Disney knows its parts very well, as each actuator is individually characterized, calling it “the secret sauce” that allows them to scale with the models.
With Boston Dynamics, Bächer shared, “It’s one quadruped that is mass-produced. We build custom robots because we have many characters, and so these technologies – modular hardware with reinforcement learning – is the key to building more characters in the future.”
While Bächer wouldn’t say what might be coming in the future, it’s clear more characters are in the pipeline and as Disney continues to invest in technology and Imagineering, the potential outcomes seem pretty much limitless – especially when the focus is on the experience and not the speeds or feeds.
That’s sort of Disney’s unique mix, and while the BDX Droids won’t replace us or even get us a glass of blue milk, these droids induce joy and create memories, and there’s something delightfully simple in that.
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jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol)
