Disney Invents an Adorable Robot for Making Giant Sand Drawings

Disney's newest robot is designed to bring characters to life on beaches. ETH Zürich

Disney's newest robot is designed to bring characters to life on beaches.

ETH Zürich

The prongs on the rake can be controlled individually, allowing the lines the BeachBot draws to vary from two inches to 15 inches. ETH Zürich

The prongs on the rake can be controlled individually, allowing the lines the BeachBot draws to vary from two inches to 15 inches.

ETH Zürich

The robot's bulbous balloon wheels allow it to traverse the entire sandy canvas without leaving tire tracks. ETH Zürich

The robot's bulbous balloon wheels allow it to traverse the entire sandy canvas without leaving tire tracks.

ETH Zürich

The laser-based positoning system gives the BeachBot to draw accurately down to the millimeter. ETH Zürich

The laser-based positoning system gives the BeachBot to draw accurately down to the millimeter.

ETH Zürich

Kids will recognize the design cue from the turtles in Finding Nemo. ETH Zürich

Kids will recognize the design cue from the turtles in Finding Nemo.

ETH Zürich

Like any good Disney project, a wide variety of themes were dreamed up—like this Cars-themed casing. ETH Zürich

Like any good Disney project, a wide variety of themes were dreamed up—like this Cars-themed casing.

ETH Zürich

The project was led by Paul Beardsley, a Principal Research Scientist at Disney Research Zurich. The team also included Professor Roland Siegwart and a team of students including Lorenz Wellhausen, Timo Müller, Jonathan Huber, Roman Müller, Markus Stäuble, Timon Homberger, Lorenz Wellhausen, Wolf Vollprecht, Manuel Rossegger, Philipp Bühler, and Dominik Rüttimann. ETH Zürich

The project was led by Paul Beardsley, a Principal Research Scientist at Disney Research Zurich. The team also included Professor Roland Siegwart and a team of students including Lorenz Wellhausen, Timo Müller, Jonathan Huber, Roman Müller, Markus Stäuble, Timon Homberger, Lorenz Wellhausen, Wolf Vollprecht, Manuel Rossegger, Philipp Bühler, and Dominik Rüttimann.

ETH Zürich

Text messages can be programmed into the robot. ETH Zürich

Text messages can be programmed into the robot.

ETH Zürich

Disney has long been a hotbed of robotic innovation, from the audio-animatronic Abraham Lincolns in its theme parks to the vision of drones in Wall-E. The Mouse’s latest electromechanical project, called the BeachBot, brings robots out of the theme parks and theaters and onto shores and sandboxes.

At just under two feet long and 15 inches wide and tall, the BeachBot can autonomously fill a 30-square-foot area of sand with images from the Lion King or Finding Nemo in under 10 minutes. Seven servo motors allow the bot to deploy the prongs of it’s rake in different configurations, creating varied brush strokes that range from two to fifteen inches wide. Bulbous balloon wheels make it possible for the ‘bot to traverse all types of sand while leaving no tracks that would mar the drawings.

The BeachBot has can control the marks it makes with an array of seven computer-controlled rakes. Photo: ETH Zurich

The BeachBot does have some limitations. Reflective poles must be placed on the beach by humans to define the canvas the robot draws on. Fine motor controls don’t mix well with sand and salty surf, so in addition to building rubberized seals into the design to protect the sensitive internal workings from the elements, extra care is required in maintenance.

The project grew out of the lab of Paul Beardsley, a Principal Research Scientist at Disney Research Zürich. Beardsley specializes in making robots with theatrical qualities, like his swarming Pixelbot drones that can arrange themselves into displays of characters on any flat surface.

“Disney has had a fundamental role in the development of two forms of entertainment—full length animated movies and theme parks,” says Beardsley. “No-one can predict exactly what might arise as new forms of entertainment in the future. But it’s certain that society is just at the start of a robot revolution, and my work is in developing new types of entertainment robots.”

There’s been no announcement of when this beachcombing robot will make its public debut, but rest assured that once it does the sandy sections of Disney’s theme parks, it’s Aulani resort in Hawaii, and the ports of call for their cruise lines will be blanketed with sandy sketches.

And for fans who prefer Frozen to Finding Nemo, a winter edition is in progress. “We are working on different modules for the BeachBot to take it off beaches and into other situations,” says Beardsley. “Snowy fields are a possibility, pretty good for Switzerland at least.”

Physicists Conjure Curves From Flat Surfaces Using Japanese Folding Art

New research based on kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of cutting and folding paper, is providing a set of rules for imbuing flat surfaces with curvature. Elod Beregszaszi/Popupology | CC BY-NC-SA

Try gift-wrapping a soccer ball, and you will quickly encounter the geometric abyss between paper’s inherent flatness and a sphere’s natural curves.

“The very first bit seems to sort of match, but as you wrap the paper around, the crinkles get bigger and bigger,” observed Toen Castle, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

With their concave curves, saddles are equally tough to wrap, but for the opposite reason. “There’s more saddle than there is paper,” Castle said.

The mismatch between soccer balls, saddles and sheets of paper lies in their “intrinsic” curvature, a property of surfaces known to mathematicians for centuries that no amount of folding can change. Scientists have sought a bridge across the divide — a systematic way of imbuing flat surfaces with curvature, which they say could revolutionize the design and assembly of three-dimensional structures and help extend a major theorem of geometry.

Now, Castle and several Penn colleagues have found just such a bridge in the same technique that tailors use to hug fabric around the curves of a body — namely, by making the right cuts. Reporting their work in December in Physical Review Letters , the physicists present a basic set of rules for cutting and reconnecting a piece of paper in order to add curvature to one point in its surface while subtracting it from another, maintaining the paper’s overall flatness while forcing it to bend into the third dimension.

“It’s a way of encoding three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional structure,” said Randall Kamien, a professor of physics at Penn who heads the research group behind the result. “The whole thing will just pop up all by itself.”