The Big Dino
The Big Idea
The idea of a large walking dinosaur was put forth by Bran Ferren, the head of Walt Disney Imagineering, Research and Development and Danny Hillis, a Disney fellow some time before 1998. Some work was done on it back in Easthampton for a while before any of us in Glendale heard about it. We asked if for our first walking figure, could it be a bit smaller so much easier to build and handle. Bran like many leaders said NO, it must be big and make a big statement.
This Could Kill Someone
Years later as we demonstrated this 11,000-pound monster, we all were thinking, if this walks down Mainstreet and it falls over, it will crush dozens of guests. During one of the later demos, Tony Baxter remarked basically, why don't you make it smaller like this tall and have it pull a cart and the cart can prevent it from falling over. If you fast-forward a few years, the Big Dino went nowhere but the medium sized Lucky the Dinosaur did make it to three different parks around the world. So yes, the seed of Lucky was the offhand comment from Tony.
The Dino Early Days
At that time, we had an R&D lab in East Hampton which was Bran's old Associates and Ferren company we bought, a small lab in Cambridge, the main lab in Glendale with the other Imagineers, and one in Florida, just behind the Horizon's Pavillion.
This project started in East Hampton and by October 1998, Danny Hillis was put in charge of it with work being done by all four labs. I was put in charge of the Control System. Others were put in charge of mechanical and someone for walking algorithms.
Bran's guys in East Hampton started the project and they designed it to be run by hydraulic actuators like all other AA figures at the time. They had purchased a V8 Corvette engine to run the hydraulic pump on board. This design would have been deafening standing next to a V8 engine running a top speed.
An Internal Coup
If you have ever read the book "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder it describes a feud or competition between two groups at Data General to design a new computer. Well we Glendale engineers thought the Dino should be all electric and started working behind the scenes on that idea. In 1998 there were very few motors that had the power density we needed. Power density meaning small and not very heavy. After some number of months, we were able to wrestle the project away from the other labs and continue to design an all-electric Dino. Soon after, Danny got busy on another project and I became the overall lead.
By March of 1999 we had bought a prototype brushless DC motor and built a test stand to see if it could support the weight required. Ultimately the Dino would weigh in at just over 11,000 pounds. That test failed and it was back to the drawing board to find another motor. At the same time, we tested a few different mechanical leg designs.
Today we would just buy a battery pack for a small EV car and be done but in 1999 there wasn't much to choose from. We looked at each type of batteries including super capacitors. It makes no sense as I write this, but we wound up with 50 12-volt lead acid batteries connected in series as we needed a 600-volt DC bus to run the motors we selected. Lead acid batteries are not light weight but came in less than other alternatives. This is not far off from the modern EV batteries which are around 400 volts DC. We made a robot unit that could swap the battery pack from the bottom though mostly we just plugged it in to charge between walking tests.
By the end of June 1999, the major pieces were starting to come together including the chassis. It took many months to machine all the parts and wire all the computers and controls. When you look at a video of the Big Dino, you will see four electrical boxes numbered 1 to 4. They housed all the interface between the computer, one per leg and all the sensors and controls for each leg. They was one more computer for the overall Dino. So five computers in all.
I usually don't discuss what vendors we use for computers or motors but Baldor, without our permission, published an article with a picture of the Dino proclaiming they supplied the motors. By the way, a good company to work with.
It took the rest of 1999 to assemble and send the Dino off to a warehouse right next to the Burbank airport runway. We called it the runway building. If you stepped outside, you could watch airplanes taxi and take off a few feet from where we were testing. We bought a boat crane that walked with the Dino in case it started to fall over and when it reached the end of the path, we picked it up with the crane and ran it back to the start. Luckily, it never fell over.
Getting Ready to Go for a Walk
Many things in my career at R&D I watched the battle between the theoretical PHD engineer/mathematician/physicists and the more down-to-earth engineers. While all this design was going on, software was being designed and written. I remember trying to hire another theoretical PHD to help with the walking algorithms. For each interview we had a wonderful conversation on their thoughts on walking. It was great up to the question, "so when you tried your algorithm, how did it do?" The answer was always the same, I could not get funding to test my theory. You are the only guys spending this kind of money on walking.
So early 2000 the theorical team assembled in Burbank to test their software. Yes I am picking on these guys. The most I saw was one leg lift and then set down again. In the meantime, I had asked our local programmers to take a different approach. Basically, we all know how to walk, we put one foot in front of the other. So can we start there and then add the theoretical stuff to tweak that. Soon after we had it walking.
Fast forward to 2019 and yes, a new R&D team with years of walking experience used all the theory and made Baby Groot walk properly. There was a world of knowledge difference in those intervening 18 years.
Many Demos but No Creative Idea
Whether you are trying to sell a new attraction or a Big Dino to upper management, you must put together a complete package of the overall creative idea, explain how that idea translates into happy guests, and convince management that this idea is feasible. Feasible means reasonable time, money, and technically possible. The creative side of R&D assumed that is thing would never walk. They poke fun at me and my team when they could and in the meantime never came up with a creative idea for this thing. So at the time, I blamed them for this project not going anywhere. It was easy to see that Micheal Eisner was board at the Big Dino's last demo. He was right, not an idea for the Parks.
That was the end of this project. For me and my team we enjoyed this project. Where else in the world can you have fun and spend millions of dollars on what you would do as a hobby if you were a billionaire. We have enough projects that do go somewhere so fun and enjoyment is not just measured with seeing it in the Parks. For those people, they have a better time where I started in either Show or Ride engineering as all your projects will wind up in the Parks.
The R&D Process
It can be argued that the R&D or the Imagineering process is an iterative one. Your first idea will not be your best or your last idea. For each failure, usually comes a better idea. So it has been said that the Big Dino led to Lucky the Dinosaur which was a good idea. Lucky was still big and expensive to operate, so Lucky led to the Muppet Mobile Lab and so on.
Afterwards
In 2000 Bran and Danny left Disney to form their own company, Applied Minds. This was actually before the Big Dino project ended. When the project ended, they asked if they could "borrow" the Big Dino to put in their lobby. Here is a picture from August 23, 2001 of the Big Dino arriving at their building on Grand Central across from the Imagineering campus. They were supposed to return it after a year but we never asked for it back and to this day they have it somewhere in a warehouse.
Demo Video
Here is a video of one of our last demos.
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