Animatronic Characters: From Tiki Birds to ABB

How animatronic characters grew from Jaquet-Droz automata and the 1963 Tiki Room to free-walking park robots, and where ABB arms and RobotStudio could fit in.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/16/20265 min read

Animatronic characters are the moving figures that sing and talk in theme parks, and lately some of them walk among the guests too. For sixty years most of them were bolted to a stage and repeated the same show every few minutes. Robots trained with machine learning are now leaving the stage to meet visitors face to face. This post looks at the clockwork automata and Disney figures that came first, at the free-walking character robots now arriving in parks, at how industrial robot arms like ABB's fit the picture, and at the safety and cost problems still open.

Blue skinned animatronic figure seated among glowing purple and blue plants in a dark ride scene
Blue skinned animatronic figure seated among glowing purple and blue plants in a dark ride scene

The Na'vi Shaman figure glows among lit plants on the Na'vi River Journey dark ride at Disney's Animal Kingdom, 2018. Photo: Steve Wise / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From clockwork writers to the Enchanted Tiki Room

People built mechanical characters long before electricity. In the 1770s the Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, with his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot, built three automata: a writer, a draughtsman and a musician. The Writer is a seated boy who dips a quill and writes a short text, driven entirely by cams and springs inside his body. All three figures are still kept at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel. The principle is the one every later animatronic uses, a stored program moving a lifelike body. In the Writer, the text it writes can be changed by resetting a wheel of cams.

Small mechanical boy in a red coat seated at a wooden desk with a quill, on a display stand
Small mechanical boy in a red coat seated at a wooden desk with a quill, on a display stand

The Writer, one of the Jaquet-Droz automata from the 1770s, at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel. Photo: Gre regiment / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Walt Disney turned the idea into an industry. His studio began work in 1949 on the giant squid for the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and it first used the term Audio-Animatronics commercially in 1961. In 1963 the Enchanted Tiki Room opened at Disneyland with singing birds, flowers and tiki gods. Tones recorded on tape made a metal reed vibrate, which tripped a relay and opened a pneumatic valve, so sound and motion stayed in sync for every show. Pneumatics moved the small parts, and hydraulics later moved larger figures.

Carved and painted tiki god face on a wooden pole lit in a dark room with red flowers
Carved and painted tiki god face on a wooden pole lit in a dark room with red flowers

A carved tiki figure in the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, the show that opened in 1963. Photo: HarshLight / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The 1964 New York World's Fair brought the technology to a mass audience, with Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, it's a small world and the Carousel of Progress all using Audio-Animatronics. Early figures moved in simple on and off steps, and analog control later gave them smoother motion. In 2009 Disney showed Otto, which it described as the first interactive figure that could hear, see and sense actions in the room. Then in 2018 it revealed Stuntronics, self-correcting robot stunt doubles that perform flips in the air.

Abraham Lincoln figure standing on a stage between columns with a red curtain, a flag and a globe
Abraham Lincoln figure standing on a stage between columns with a red curtain, a flag and a globe

The Lincoln figure on stage in Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland, 2012. Photo: Cory Doctorow / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Free-walking character robots in parks today

The biggest change now is that characters walk among guests with no fence in between. Disney's roaming BD-X droids were already walking around Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in 2024. On 29 March 2026 a free-roaming Olaf robot debuted in the new World of Frozen at Disneyland Paris, with World of Frozen at Hong Kong Disneyland named as the next stop. A Disney Research paper on the project describes reinforcement learning guided by animation references, two legs hidden under a foam skirt, and how hard it was to copy Olaf's odd walk. In September 2026 Josh Gad, Olaf's voice actor, met the robot in the park.

Two small white and orange walking droid robots on a stone floor next to park guests
Two small white and orange walking droid robots on a stone floor next to park guests

Roaming droids walk among guests at Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in Disneyland, 2024. Photo: Contributor19 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Startups want the same thing for any venue. On 13 October 2026 the Boston Globe described Hugo, a furry mountain troll prototype from Dynamic Creatures, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup led by former Boston Dynamics chief strategy officer Marc Theermann. The company calls itself Boston Dynamics' entertainment and hospitality partner. Its SnowJay platform combines reinforcement learning control, real-time computer vision and behaviour programming. Dynamic Creatures plans to lease characters to theme parks and hotels, and Theermann has named safety around children as a design concern.

Yellow four legged robot standing on a dirt path in a green forest
Yellow four legged robot standing on a dirt path in a green forest

Spot, the legged robot from Boston Dynamics, whose technology Dynamic Creatures builds on. Photo: Jonte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Industrial robot arms come into this business where the motion is heavy and has to repeat exactly. Theme parks already use arms to carry ride seats, the topic of our post on theme park robot arm rides. ABB has also put a robot on stage. In 2017 its YuMi conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra with tenor Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, using movements taught to it by a human conductor. An IRB 6700 could in principle swing a large creature figure, and a GoFa cobot could move a small character near guests. No source shows ABB building park characters, so both are only possibilities.

Orchestra on stage with a singer in front and a white two armed ABB robot on a pedestal conducting
Orchestra on stage with a singer in front and a white two armed ABB robot on a pedestal conducting

ABB's YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

Where character robots go next

Show programming is starting to look like robot programming. Animators used to set every movement by hand on a timeline. Now teams train a control policy in simulation, test it, then copy it to the real body. Industrial engineers work the same way when they build and check a cell in RobotStudio before the robot moves. Over the next few years I would expect more of this crossover, with walking figures trained on animation clips and stage arms programmed offline.

Two engineers at a desk with a screen showing a robot cell layout and a large white ABB robot behind
Two engineers at a desk with a screen showing a robot cell layout and a large white ABB robot behind

Engineers plan a robot cell in RobotStudio with an ABB large robot behind them. Photo: ABB

At home, the same methods could reach toys and companion robots, though a lifelike character costs far more than a smart speaker. In parks the open problems are practical. A walking character has to stay upright in a crowd, stop at once if a child grabs it and run all day on batteries. Motors, joints and soft skins also wear out, so crews have to service each figure between shows. Even fixed figures fail: on 22 September 2026 WDW News Today reported that an Olaf animatronic breakdown forced The Magic of Disney Animation at Disney's Hollywood Studios to close.

Lincoln figure with a lifelike head and an exposed metal and plastic body frame in a museum
Lincoln figure with a lifelike head and an exposed metal and plastic body frame in a museum

A Lincoln Audio-Animatronic shown without its skin in Walt Disney: One Man's Dream at Disney's Hollywood Studios, 2017. Photo: HarshLight / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Skills are the other limit. A character robot needs mechanical designers, costume makers, animators and control engineers on one team, and few schools teach that mix. The factories that build the figures could hand routine jobs, such as machining parts and testing joints for thousands of cycles, to standard industrial robots. ABB's arms already do that kind of work in other industries, so the workshop is probably where its robots would meet the animatronic business first.

Large white ABB industrial robot holding a flat panel inside a factory hall
Large white ABB industrial robot holding a flat panel inside a factory hall

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a solar module for a folding roof at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

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