Stunt actors are generally overlooked and underappreciated. After all many people go to the movies to see their favorite actors and actresses, not to see who plays their stunt double. However stunt doubles are no doubt a necessity, especially in physically demanding movies, such as action movies.
It can be a dangerous profession, but Disney thinks that they might have solved that, or at least provided an alternative as the company has managed to create a very realistic and humanoid robotic stunt double. The project is dubbed Stuntronics and it basically involves robots that are capable of making on-the-go corrections to nail down the perfect stunt, as you can see in the video above in which the robots perform somersaults and tumbles perfectly.
There is even a scene in which the robot flies up in the air, poses like a superhero, before falling back down where it manages to tuck its body in to perform a roll and lands safely into the netting. We’re not sure if there are plans to put them to use in movies, but Disney has stated that they will be used in the company’s theme parks, but where and how exactly remains to be seen.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Morgan Pope, Associate Research Scientist at Disney said, “So often our robots are in the uncanny valley where you got a lot of function, but it still doesn’t look quite right. And I think here the opposite is true. When you’re flying through the air, you can have a little bit of function and you can produce a lot of stuff that looks pretty good, because of this really neat physics opportunity — you’ve got these beautiful kinds of parabolas and sine waves that just kind of fall out of rotating and spinning through the air in ways that are hard for people to predict, but that look fantastic.”