Disney Research

The Walt Disney Company's R&D arm, which uses reinforcement learning to turn animated characters into physical robots.

Disney Research was founded by The Walt Disney Company in 2008 to work on graphics, vision, machine learning, and robotics. It now splits into two parts: DisneyResearch|Studios in Zurich, led by ETH graphics professor Markus Gross, serves film production; the robotics side sits within Walt Disney Imagineering, with teams in Los Angeles and Zurich. Its robotics group, led by Moritz Bächer in Zurich, specializes in “character robots”: animators first design personality-filled motions, and reinforcement learning trains a control policy in simulation so the physical robot moves like the character without falling over. Its best-known work includes the Star Wars-style bipedal BDX droid, which appeared in NVIDIA's GTC keynote in March 2025, and Olaf from Frozen, who shared the stage with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at GTC in March 2026 and has performed on a boat ride at Disneyland Paris since March 29. Disney Research also co-launched the open-source physics engine Newton together with NVIDIA and Google DeepMind.

ExampleOlaf hides his two legs under a foam “skirt”; when training its control policy, the team even fed motor temperature in as an input, to keep the small motors in its skinny neck from overheating.

Also called

DisneyResearch|Studios

Related

Disney Research BDX Droid · Newton Physics Engine · RL-based Locomotion Control · Sim-to-Real Transfer · NVIDIA GTC

Sources

Nvidia and Google DeepMind will help power Disney's cute robots（TechCrunch）
NVIDIA GTC: Walt Disney Imagineering's Olaf Robotic Character（Disney Experiences）
Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World（Disney Research）

As of

2026-03