Disney Research BDX Droid

Disney's Star Wars-style bipedal droid, using reinforcement learning to bring animator-designed moves to real hardware.

BDX is a bipedal character robot developed jointly by Disney Research and Walt Disney Imagineering, styled after the small droids from Star Wars, used to interact with guests at Disney theme parks and similar venues. Its technical approach is described in the paper “Design and Control of a Bipedal Robotic Character” (RSS 2024): animators first design expressive motions, such as a walk cycle or a curious head-turn, and reinforcement learning then trains a control policy in simulation that can perform those motions on the real robot while staying balanced; at runtime, an animation engine blends multiple animation clips into commands, and an operator triggers behaviors with a remote control. It demonstrates that “expressive, animator-designed motion” and “robust locomotion control” can be achieved together. It also appeared on stage at NVIDIA's GTC in 2025, and the open-source community has since built a replica project, Open Duck Mini.

ExampleBDX waddles up to park guests and tilts its head to “greet” them; these expressive movements were designed by animators and are executed by a reinforcement-learning policy.

Also called

BDX, BD-X, BDX Droids

Related

Bipedal Robot · RL-based Locomotion Control · Motion Tracking · Open Duck Mini · Sim-to-Real Transfer · Newton Physics Engine

Sources

Design and Control of a Bipedal Robotic Character - Disney Research
Design and Control of a Bipedal Robotic Character - arXiv
BDX Droids - Disney Research

As of

2025