BDX droids are taking over at The Walt Disney Co. The Burbank entertainment and media giant’s Imagineering division in Glendale designed and built the robots, which have greeted guests at Disneyland and aboard the Disney Wish cruise ship.

The droids also appeared alongside Chief Executive Bob Iger in a video presented at the company’s annual meeting of shareholders last month; at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, in early March with filmmaker Jon Favreau; and at Nvidia Corp.’s recent GTC developer conference also taking place last month. 

The drones can learn

Unlike the animatronics of the past, the BDX droids can learn and teach each other, Disney said in a release.

This process, called reinforcement learning, is an entirely new way to program animatronic characters, said Leslie Evans, a senior Imagineer in research and development at Disney Imagineering, when appearing at SXSW.

“They learn, they experiment, they teach each other, and they figure out how to navigate different types of terrain,” Evans said at the conference. “When we’re training in simulation, we’re not just teaching them to balance, we’re teaching them how to learn to walk as characters and imitate those core animations that really give them their personality.”

The BDX droids will be making their on-screen debut in next year’s “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” Disney said the droids will also visit Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris later this year.