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Spiderman Stuntronic Slingshot full in detail Information

So Disney has this impressive robotic Spiderman, it Slingshots 65 feet into the air over and over again every single day and it happens at the Avengers campus in Disney California adventure park. We got a behind the scenes look at the Engineering magic that went into this Marvel superhero show.

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Here are things you never knew about Disney's Stuntronic.

Spiderman Stuntronics is a word coined by Disney to describe technology that uses a robot as a stunt double. That way a robot can perform heroic feats that may be too dangerous for a human to do. Slingshotting robots around is a bit of new territory for Disney to have fun with the illusion. The robot is only a small part of the Spider-man show in the park. Guests also watch a human actor before the robotic stunt double has its moment in the spotlight. It took more than 10 prototypes to get to the Stuntronics Spider-man that is seen today. Some parts were built in days and others took months.

Walt Disney Imagineering research scientists, Morgan pope and Tony Dohey gave us an up-close look at the prototypes they built and the story of how it came together. So here are seven little-known secrets about the Stuntronics Spider-man.

The robot does have a name, it's Tom, as in Tom Holland the actor who plays Spider-man in the marvel movies. Now Mr Holland has a role in the pre-show for the Spider-man ride that's at the park the ride is called web slingers and when Mr Holland was at the campus doing voice-over work for the ride, he visited the imaginary lab to check out the robotic stunt double that shares his name. We asked him if he wouldn't mind signing our robots in a sense sort of giving them his blessing and he was really great about it and he just loved it so they've actually taken that signature and embossed it into all the other 3D printed Chess Plates.

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So I guess you could say all the bots have a touch of Tom Holland with them. But these bots didn't start out looking human. In the beginning, it was all just a Brick and a Raccoon head, the first pieces created for this project needed to answer a few questions and the most important question was is it possible to create a robot that could do stunts. That's how Morgan Pope and Tony Dohey's work came together. Tony was working on these automations which were not electronic. These were simple models to test movement and at the same time Morgan was working on this electronic Brick that has weights inside that can shift and move around and that lets it change how fast it spins and where it lands. Then the mission came to try to put these ideas together to make something that could move while being thrown across a room. So it looks alive in a sense by giving it action. Several prototypes came together, the first one looks like a piece of wood with a joint but it actually has the same sensors as the Brick.

From there it was a matter of solving problems; adding electricity, exploring the different joint configurations, making it look human, deciding how to power it, throwing it through the air again and again and again and you know learning a few lessons along the way. One of those lessons is about elbows the final design does not have working elbows turns out you can make a very convincing Spider-man without having working elbow joints.

This is also the robot where we learned we didn't need elbows. He originally had an elbow joint but they ended up locking it off because they didn't need it. That's really weird and beautiful and there is the key to the whole illusion because Spider-man needs to be awkward. Peter Parker is a teenager that has no clue what he's doing. He's making it up as he goes so the perfect Spider-man is something that doesn't move perfectly.

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One of the creative directors Dan Fields said “hey you guys seem to have all these Spider-man animations down, he's looking really great with the leg splay you know some of these other things that you're doing with him” but he brought it to the teams attention that the character of Spider-man is just a teenage kid and he's somewhat flawed in that. He isn't necessarily the master of his abilities and his talents especially in a new Stark Suit for example.

So could they do an animation that looks like he's going through the air out of control and what made that so challenging is that robots are great at doing beautiful precise movements smooth but making them look like they're actually out of control was a lot harder than they thought. So they had to spend some serious time actually dialing that in so the look of fear in a robot's mind feels natural and not repetitive.

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Yeah speaking of things going wrong, when you decide to make a giant robot fall from the air every day for months something's gonna break to account for this. The Stuntronics Spider-man prototypes were from quite early on made to be broken. They built them to be robust and to be able to take that kind of beating but also built them intentionally with places where they knew that it could break and if it's going to break. It was easier to just make something that you could switch out instead of trying to beef it up and beef it up and beef it up until it was indestructible.

Now as you're building and programming a realistic Spider-man, you have to ask yourself what makes Spider-man look like Spider-man when he's flying? That radioactive Spider bite turned him into a master acrobat, so he's very nimble and he has these cool iconic poses as he bends his legs in awesome ways and as the Disney team was having the robot move around in the air with various poses and bends, they noticed it was beating itself up. You could see the face of the prototype how it's all scratched and banged up. You may think it's because of all the falls it took from heavy testing. No! that is because the creators threw this at least a thousand times before they retired it and went to the next prototype.

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The reason why the face looks as scarred as it does is not because it hit the ground, it's because this had so much range of motion that right that kneed itself in the face. That's right, it could get there so they learned some things right with this. They designed that out in the next prototype right but much like the comic book hero, it was able to handle a few blows just fine.

Now of course we have to talk about how Spider-man gets his power because with great power comes great responsibility. I mean how the robot gets its power? It does not run on typical rechargeable batteries. The time this robot is moving in the air is very short, so it uses something to store and release energy very quickly known as Super capacitors.

This kind of battery does not rely on chemical reactions like the lithium ion in your phone or one of these. They realized they didn't need to carry the weight of batteries. The animations over such a short period of time, it's under four seconds basically the super-caps are a fun technology to use here because they can take and deliver lots of current super rapidly.

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We usually don't use them as often because they don't have a super high energy storage capacity so you can't use it regularly, it's like a little tiny gas tank but you can pull a lot of energy out of it very quickly. They needed the Spiderman to be doing very energetic things while he's in the air but didn't need to have him do it for a long time, so it was a fun use of the of that technology which is a little bit unusual. You may hear about supercapacitors when we talk about the future of electric vehicles, Spider-man does whatever an electric car can.

So there you have it, amazing facts for the amazing Stuntronic Spider-man at Disney California adventure park and if you like this kind of content from our site, be sure to comment down below and let us know that you want more of this. Thanks for reading.

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