By Isabelle Bousquette
SAN JOSE, Calif -- Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang invited just one guest onstage during his two-hour keynote address Tuesday: a small robotic droid named Besh
"Look how smart you are," he said, as Besh bounced along with puppy-like pride.
The thousands jammed into the local hockey arena for AI chip giant Nvidia's annual GTC developers event, dubbed "AI Woodstock," cheered, laughed and whipped out their phones to capture an adorable pet-sized robot.
Besh, created by Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, is based on a character from a "Star Wars" videogame.
"It's a cute Disney robot. Of course it's going to steal the show," said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia.
But it was also a precursor of one of Nvidia's latest innovations, a physics engine called Newton designed to train robots on how to navigate the physical world.
Nvidia says Newton, which is expected to be available later this year and was co-developed with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, will have implications for training robots in areas like healthcare and logistics, fueling what Lebaredian said will become a $ 10 trillion industry that redefines the value and availability of human labor.
Some of these industry-specific robots were also showcased on the convention floor: one sorted small cubes into different piles, another struggled to push a vacuum cleaner around a small rug.
But during Huang's keynote and afterward, it was Besh and its robo-sibling, Grek, also tootling around the GTC convention floor, that caught the attention of attendees.
"Everybody seems to love interacting with them, taking photos with them, " said Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development. "They've become true stars."
Moritz Bächer, associate lab director of Robotics for Disney Research, said that the droids represent the latest in Disney's decadeslong experience with complicated mechanical systems, dating back to the animatronic robots inhabiting Disneyland's decades-old Hall of Presidents.
In addition to Besh, who is blue, and Grek, who is green, Disney has two other droids in orange and red that have made a limited number of appearances at Disneyland since debuting in October 2023. They also joined their first cruise ship this past January, and have scheduled appearances later this year at Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Walt Disney World.
Bächer, who is considered the droids' "father," said a team of eight developed the first iteration of the droids over the course of one year. Each droid is equipped with cameras and sensors for monitoring the physical space around it and a GPU for processing the inputs.
Bächer said the robots were trained to navigate the physical world through a process known as reinforcement learning: In a virtual simulation, a digital replica of the droid was prompted to walk again and again until it walked perfectly and stopped falling down, receiving positive feedback when it walked correctly and negative feedback when it didn't.
Completing the training in a virtual simulation allowed the real-world droids to understand how to walk from the get-go without ever falling down. In his speech, Huang said autonomous vehicles and other types of robots could be trained similarly.
The droids were also taught how to express certain emotions through the process. Disney artists drafted animations of the exact actions they wanted a droid to take to express feelings like happiness, shyness or anger. A shy droid would tilt its head downward and avoid eye contact, for example. An angry droid would puff out its chest and glare. Again, virtual versions of the droids learned the actions by getting feedback through repeated simulations.
When the droids make appearances today, human creative directors use a remote controller to tell them what direction to move in or what emotion to express based on the circumstances. But Disney is now working to give the droids more autonomy by capturing data on how human directors are typically telling them to respond to various scenarios.
The goal is that the droids will become more adept at knowing how to interact with humans, although the human holding the remote controller won't disappear. Bächer said that since it's an entertainment use case, the company isn't prioritizing full robotic autonomy and instead wants to retain control over the droids and their interactions.
In other words, don't expect these droids to go rogue. Case in point: During Bächer's talk on Thursday, one GTC attendee asked, "Can we create the most viral clip of Nvidia GTC 2025? Green robot, can you run into the blue robot and see what happens?" Grek then turned to Besh, blinked nervously and then politely declined.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 20, 2025 16:55 ET (20:55 GMT)
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