India’s central bank has restricted American Express and Diners Club from adding new customers starting next month, it said Friday citing violation of local data-storage rules.
In a statement, the Reserve Bank of India said existing customers of either of the two card companies will not be impacted by the new order, which goes into effect May 1.
This is the first time India’s central bank has penalized any firm for non-compliance with local data storage rules, which was unveiled in 2018. The rules require payments firms to store all Indian transaction data within servers in the country.
Visa, Mastercard, and several other firms, as well as the U.S. government, have previously requested New Delhi to reconsider its rules, which is designed to allow the regulator “unfettered supervisory access.”
Visa, Mastercard, and American Express had also lobbied to either significantly change the rules or completely discard it. But after none of those efforts worked, most firms began to comply.
In a statement Friday evening (local time), an Amex spokesperson said the company was “disappointed that the RBI has this course of action,” but said was working with the authority to resolve the concerns “as quickly as possible.”
With about 1.5 million customers, American Express has amassed the highest number of customers among foreign banks in India.
“We have been in regular dialogue with the Reserve Bank of India about data localization requirements and have demonstrated our progress towards complying with the regulation. […] This does not impact the services that we offer to our existing customers in India, and our customers can continue to use and accept our cards as normal.”
Diners Club, which is owned by Discover Financial Services and offers credit cards in India through a partnership with the nation’s largest private sector bank (HDFC), said in a statement that India remains an important market for the firm and it is working with the central bank to reach a resolution so that it can “continue to grow in the country.”
Last year, India’s central bank ordered HDFC Bank to not add new credit customers or launch digital businesses after the bank’s services were hit by a power outage.
Friday’s order comes as Citigroup, another key foreign bank in India, has announced plans to exit most of its Asian consumer business as it looks to boost its profitability. The consumer operations of the bank in 13 countries is up for sale.
Don’t let procrastination slow your roll. Yeah, we’re looking at you, early-stage founders. At TechCrunch, we love to reward action with savings. Want to save a cool $100? Buy your Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising passbefore April 30, at 11:59 p.m. (PT), and you’ll keep a cool $100 in your pocket.
Take action, reap savings and get ready to join your community of early-inning startup founders for a two-day bootcamp (July 8-9) dedicated to helping you build a firm foundation for entrepreneurial success. We’re talking a day packed with highly interactive presentations, breakout sessions and plenty of time for Q&As with top-tier industry leaders and experts — plus a thrilling day-long pitch competition.
Part one of TC Early Stage 2021, which took place in April, featured folks like entrepreneur and VC Melissa Bradley, who delivered advice on nailing a virtual pitch meeting; Alexa von Tobel lead a discussion on finance for founders; and Fuel Capital’s Leah Solivan revealed 10 things not to do when you start a company.
Here’s just one example of the quality topics and guidance you can expect at TC Early Stage 2021 in July.
Plenty of founders struggle to find, or even define, product-market fit. And let’s face it, without the proper product-market fit, you basically have two chances of raising a unicorn: slim and fat. That’s why you won’t want to miss out on what Superhuman founder, CEO and product-market fit master, Rahul Vohra has to say on the subject. Bring your questions and take advantage of his invaluable advice.
Pro Tip: We’re building our July agenda and announcing new speakers every week (like Mike Duboe and Sarah Kunst) — stay tuned!
Wondering whether attending TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising is worth your time and money? Here’s what two founders shared about their experience at last year’s event.
Early Stage 2020 provided a rich, bootcamp experience with premier founders, VCs and startup community experts. If you’re beginning to build a startup, it’s an efficient way to advance your knowledge across key startup topics. — Katia Paramonova, founder and CEO of Centrly.
Sequoia Capital’s session, Start with Your Customer, looked at the benefits of storytelling and creating customer personas. I took the idea to my team and we identified seven different user types for our product, and we’ve implemented storytelling to help onboard new customers. That one session alone has transformed my business. — Chloe Leaaetoa, founder, Socicraft.
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The best venture capitalists take moonshot risks based on due diligence, support portfolio companies through ups and downs and find focus through noise.
When you look at the job description of the best founder, you’ll find nearly the exact same list of characteristics (except, of course, instead of a portfolio, the founder is supporting a team of employees). The shared ethos is almost uncanny — and includes a slew of strategic synergies both sides of the table can exploit.
That’s why we’re excited to announce that Lisa Wu, a partner at Norwest, is joining us at TechCrunch Early Stage in July to talk tactics, and how founders can think like a VC in all facets of their business.
Wu focuses on seed to late-stage companies with a specific interest in consumer internet, digital commerce and next-generation marketplaces. Her portfolio includes Calm, Ritual, Plaid and the recently public Opendoor.
With the inside scoop on these iconic companies, Wu will use her experience to illustrate how the best founders can leverage the language of venture capital in the pitch and beyond. The goal is to give the audience a list of actionable insights to implement immediately — and lean heavily on anecdotes found in Wu’s impressive work in the industry.
Tickets for TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising are available at the early-bird rate, which gives you an instant $100 savings if you book before next week!
While there’s been plenty of attention and money lavished on virtual event platforms over the past year, Introvoke co-founder and CEO Oana Manolache predicted that we’re only at the beginning of a “third wave of digital transformation.”
In her framing, the first wave came at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was using video conferencing tools like Zoom for their virtual events. Next came conference platforms like Hopin (which has been raising money at a mind-boggling clip). But Manolache argued that even Hopin represents a “Band-Aid” that customers are hoping will tide them over until in-person events can resume — particularly organizers have to point attendees to a third-party platform.
“One size does not fit all,” she said. “The Band-Aid solution that was only supposed to last for a couple months has had big benefits as companies grew their customer base and revenue targets. Now we’ve reached the third wave, as organizations want to bring solutions to their own universe and own their relationship with the audience.”
San Francisco-based Introvoke is a Techstars Accelerator graduate aiming to provide this third-wave solution. It’s announcing today that it has raised $2.7 million in funding led by Struck Capital, while Comcast, Social Leverage, Great Oaks, V1vc, Time CTO Bharat Krish and Resy co-founder Mike Montero also participated.
The startup offers components like virtual stages, chat rooms and networking hubs, all customizable and embeddable on a customer’s website. Manolache said Introvoke (the name comes from the idea of “thought-provoking introductions”) is designed for a hybrid future, which will take multiple forms: “Hybrid is going to mean virtual-only events, in-person only events and events that have in-person and virtual elements.”
Image Credits: Introvoke
Introvoke charges customers based on on live event minutes, a model that it says is accessible to companies large and small. Its components can be embedded on websites built with WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Splash and other platforms, but also on a customer’s internal intranet.
“We’ve been so impressed by the way customers are using the technology — conferences, career fairs, employee engagements,” Manolache said.
She added that as customers like Comcast, Wharton and Ritual Motion have used the platform in private preview mode, they’re beginning to break free of the in-person model. For example, Introvoke events can allow for attendees to chat with each other over weeks or months, not just a few days.
In a statement, Struck Capital founder and Managing Partner Adam B. Struck suggested that virtual events “will continue far beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Right now, virtual experiences, from conferences and concerts to company all-hands, are generally hosted on third party platforms, which creates a disjointed experience for the brand or organization hosting the event,” he continued. “Virtual enablement should be native to the website and platform of the enterprise itself, and it’s the role of technologists like the Introvoke team to make these experiences as seamless as any in-person event.”
After spending much of his career in mission-critical environments, including the Israeli Air Force, Israeli Intelligence and leading development of a cybersecurity product at Microsoft, Amit Rosenzweig turned his attention to autonomous vehicles.
It was a technology that he soon recognized would need what every other mission-critical system requires: humans.
“I understood that there are so many edge cases that will not be solved purely by AI and machine learning, and there must be some kind of human-in-the-loop intervention,” Rosenzweig said in a recent interview. “You don’t have any mission-critical system on the planet — not nuclear power plants, not airplanes — without human supervision. A human must be in the loop or present in some way for autonomous mobility to exist, even in 10 or probably 20 years from now.”
That “human in the loop” conclusion led Rosenzweig to found teleoperations startup Ottopia in 2018. (His brother, Oren Rosenzweig is also in the autonomous vehicle business via the lidar company he co-founded, Innoviz.) Ottopia’s first product is a universal teleoperation platform that allows a human operator to monitor and control any type of vehicle from thousands of miles away. Ottopia’s software is combined with off-the-shelf hardware components like monitors and cameras to create a teleoperations center. The company’s software also includes assistive features, which provide “path” instructions to the AV without having to remotely control the vehicle.
Since launching, the small 25-person company has racked up investors and partners such as BMW, fixed-route AV startup May Mobility and Bestmile. Ottopia said Friday that it has raised $9 million from Hyundai Motor Group as well as Maven and IN Venture, the Israel-focused venture capital arm of Sumitomo Corporation. Existing investors MizMaa and Israeli firm NextGear also participated.
Hyundai and IN Venture also gained board seats. Woongjun Jang, who heads up Hyundai’s autonomous driving center, and IN Venture managing partner Eyal Rosner, are now on Ottopia’s board.
Ottopia has raised a total of $12 million to date, and Rosenzweig has already set his sights on a larger round to help fund the company’s growth.
For now, Rosenzweig is focused on doubling his workforce to 50 people by the end of the year and opening an office in the United States. Rosenzweig said the company is also expanding into other applications of its teleoperations software, including defense, mining and logistics. However, most of Ottopia’s resources will continue to be dedicated to automotive, and specifically the deployment of autonomous cars, trucks and shuttles.
“The motivation is really simple — it’s simple but it’s hard to do — and that’s to make affordable autonomous transportation closer to reality,” Rosenzweig said. “The problem of course is that when an AV does not have any kind of backup or any kind of safety net in the form of teleoperations and it gets stuck, passengers are going to get anxious, ‘what’s going on, why, why is this not moving’.”
The other problem, Rosenzweig noted, is that AVs need to be combined with an efficient transit service. That’s where he sees his newest partner, on-demand shuttle and transit software company Via, coming in.
Under the partnership, which was also announced this week, Via will offer autonomous vehicle fleets that combine its fleet management software with Ottopia’s teleoperations platform. Via is not developing its own self-driving software system. In November 2020, Via announced it had partnered with May Mobility to launch an autonomous vehicle platform that integrates on-demand shared rides, public transportation and transit options for passengers with accessibility needs.
To close out the week, a short meditation on value, or, more precisely, how assets are valued in today’s markets.
Do you recall the pre-direct-listing hype Coinbase enjoyed? After reporting its estimated first-quarter financial performance, interest in the domestic cryptocurrency trading giant ran red-hot.
When Coinbase set a $250 per-share direct listing reference price, it was broadly viewed as modest, if not downright low. Of course, a reference price is just that — a reference — so it wasn’t too big a deal. But it also wasn’t surprising that Coinbase shares traded as high as $429.54 on their first day, according to Yahoo Finance data.
Coinbase equity hasn’t topped $400 in any following day and is now under the $300 mark, with more declines set to arrive as trading commences. Its reference price looms, and suddenly a price that felt intensely conservative before Coinbase began to trade is starting to look nearly reasonable.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
There have been other notable declines in value among some recently public, more technologically differentiated companies. The Exchange has watched with something akin to polite confusion as the value of Root, a neo-insurance company, fell to a third of its public-market highs after going public, even though it beat growth expectations in its most recent quarterly report.
We could toss UiPath into our trend of wildly meandering value. The company’s initial IPO price range targeted a price as low as $43 per share. Today it’s worth $76.75 per share in pre-market trading.
No one knows what anything is worth, again. This is the feeling I get while watching the markets work to determine how to value assets as diverse as startups crossing the private-public divide to the value of Bitcoin, which was supposed to keep going up. Until it suddenly reversed gear.
Frankly, we’re still dealing with new-enough models — or big-enough guesses about the future baked into business models — that it’s hard to really value the most uncertain (and therefore most exciting) companies, let alone cryptocurrencies. Let’s discuss.
Sophie Ruddock is VP, GM North America at Multiverse, a tech startup focused on high-quality education and training through professional apprenticeships.
Ryan CraigContributor
Ryan Craig is managing director of Achieve Partners, an investment firm focused at the intersection of education and employment, and author of “A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College.”
You can always tell a system is broken when you change the inputs and the outcomes don’t improve. Any software engineer will tell you that.
Using this metric, it’s clear the United States’ antiquated higher education system is truly broken. Overpriced and underperforming, the system is failing on two key fronts: addressing racial inequalities and closing our country’s growing tech skills gaps.
For all the changes made to the system to welcome people of color into the classroom, the outcomes in terms of wealth, equity distribution and representation are worse than ever.
A labor market built on degree requirements has little hope of correcting course.
While colleges and universities do as good a job as they’ve ever done at preparing students with the cognitive and critical thinking skills they’ll need to be successful in the long run, the college system just isn’t providing the right training for jobs in 2021.
Looking past the college experience, the unemployment rate for Black Americans stands at nearly 10%, compared with 5.5% for white Americans, while the typical Black American family has eight times less wealth than a white family. This is coupled with the fact that Black people make up just 4.1% of Russell 3000 board members — compared to 13.4% of the population.
This isn’t just a matter of grave injustice. The racial wealth gap costs the U.S. economy $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in GDP output each year. There is a financial and moral imperative to do something about it.
Then there’s the skills gaps: For all the belated changes made to academic programs and curricula, and while colleges and universities do as good a job as they’ve ever done at preparing students with the cognitive and critical thinking skills they’ll need to be successful in the long run, the college system just isn’t providing the right training for jobs in 2021. Ten years ago, 56% of CEOs were “extremely” or “somewhat” concerned by the lack of talent for digital roles. By 2019, this had jumped to 79%. This is why well over 50% of new and recent graduates are underemployed in their first jobs out of college (two-thirds of whom will be underemployed five years later, and half a decade later).
There must be a better way. A way that empowers young people to achieve in-demand skills while avoiding the decades-long burden of student loans. A way that doesn’t discriminate based on socioeconomic background while exposing talent-hungry employers to a new pool of qualified, driven individuals.
In the explosion of edtech businesses with new approaches, we are in danger of overlooking an established model that can be adapted to solve these challenges. That model is apprenticeships.
The apprenticeship movement
There’s a lingering perception in America that apprenticeships are the province of construction and building trades, or even medieval guilds like smithing and glass-blowing. Well, not anymore. While we’ve been focused on edtech, or despairing over the widening skills gap, apprenticeships have been rebooted. Modern, tech-driven apprenticeships are emerging as a faster, cheaper and more impactful alternative to higher education.
In Europe, tech companies — and nontech companies increasingly hiring entry-level workers with discrete tech skills — are already leveraging apprenticeships to provide a direct route into the labor market for diverse talent. From software engineers to data analysts, the apprentice of the 21st century is as likely to wield a keyboard as a wrench.
Fully employed from day one, apprentices earn a wage while they learn on a program that is entirely free to the individual. Their training is delivered alongside their role, with this applied learning approach ensuring relevant skills are tested and embedded right away.
Part of the challenge presented by the existing system is that college provides a single shot of learning at the start of a career, with a focus on knowledge rather than skills. Instead of time-consuming traditional education models, we should be encouraging companies to focus on training individuals for highly skilled jobs and adapting training as roles shift through a lifelong learning journey.
Against a college system churning out graduates armed with knowledge of limited applicability in the workplace, apprentices have real-work experience and transferable skill sets in the tech and digital spaces.
These aren’t just words, either. The apprenticeship reboot will be powered by a new National Apprenticeship Act . This proposed legislation commits $3 billion over the next five years to expanding registered apprenticeship programs across a range of industries. If it’s done right, tech will be front and center.
The benefit to businesses
All this is welcome good news for businesses desperate to close skills gaps. As roles evolve at an ever-faster pace, it’s becoming more and more difficult to know what a college degree actually says about an individual’s ability. Yes, they went to a “good” school. But when half of Americans say their degree is irrelevant to their current role, how does prestige translate to jobs, let alone ability to perform in the workplace?
Increasingly operating in the dark, tech businesses and nontech managers hiring for tech roles are competing with each other to poach experienced talent into senior roles. It’s continuing to fish in a very limited, homogeneous pool and an expensive short-term solution.
Professional apprenticeships allow business leaders to be more strategic and proactive in their hiring practices. They can mold apprentices to the roles they actually need to fill while focusing on their organization’s specific requirements. It beats relying on uniform, outdated education models.
Better still, by training apprentices from the start of their career, companies inspire loyalty and eliminate the tricky transition phase recent grads and external hires usually need. Once converted to full-time employees, apprentices tend to persist for twice as long as traditional direct hires.
While skills gaps are created by the future racing toward us, racial inequalities are rooted in our past. Professional apprenticeships help break down entrenched structural barriers to careers in industries like tech.
Most important, they look beyond the degree requirements that screen out 67% of Black and 79% of Hispanic Americans. Because apprenticeships are paid pathways to economic opportunity, they truly level the playing field and allow companies to make genuine advances toward racial equality — beyond a few neatly crafted Instagram posts. Meanwhile, by tapping into diverse talent pools early, businesses can develop individuals and build real, recognizable routes to the boardroom.
They would be right, too. A 2020 report by McKinsey found companies with the highest diversity earned 35% more than their industry average. Similarly, the share returns of the most diverse companies in the S&P 500 outperformed the least diverse by a staggering 240%.
The time for change is now. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 41% of grads end up in roles that don’t require a degree. With COVID-19 hitting young workers particularly hard, this figure is set to rise unless we embrace new approaches, including professional apprenticeships. In creating a direct and meaningful career pathway for young adults, they can help businesses close skills gaps and hit their much-vaunted diversity targets.
There’s no single solution to these challenges. But the professional apprenticeship can be education’s biggest contribution.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
First and foremost, Equity was nominated a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”!!! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each other laugh.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Chris got together to chat through the week’s biggest news. And like every other week in recent memory, it was a busy one. But we did our best to hit some M&A news, some unicorn news, and some funding news from smaller startups.
Now, onto the show rundown, here’s what we discussed:
The Discord-Microsoft deal is done, and Danny has a hot take. Namely, in his view, the deal was mostly banker chatter more than a real possibility. More chaff than wheat, in other words. Agree or not, we’re stoked for the Discord IPO in a few years (quarters?) time.
And then we closed with two seed rounds raised by recent Y Combinator grads: Here’s the Queenly round, and here’s the Albedo deal!
We’ll see you on Monday.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
Does the science, technology — and yes, art — of creating new ways to transport people and parcels get your EV motor running? Then join us on June 9 at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021.
We’ll pack the day with interactive presentations and breakout sessions. Explore new tech, find emerging trends, discover what’s catching investor interest — and learn about evolving regulatory issues that affect the way mobility startups engage with cities and towns around the globe.
Buy your pass and take advantage of this extra perk — one free month of access to Extra Crunch, our members-only program featuring exclusive daily articles for founders and startup teams. Can you say value add? Yes, yes you can.
Pro Tip 1: Did you already buy a pass? No worries — we’ll email existing pass holders details on how they can claim their free Extra Crunch membership. All new ticket purchasers will receive information via email immediately after they complete their purchase.
Pro Tip 2: Do you already subscribe to Extra Crunch? Simply email extracrunch@techcrunch.com, tell us you’re an existing Extra Crunch member who bought a ticket to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, and we’ll happily extend your membership.
TechCrunch always delivers the top experts in their field, and this event is no exception. You’ll connect and engage with the mobility movers, shakers, influencers and makers. It’s an opportunity to expand your network, find funding, forge new partnerships and yes, scope out your competition, too.
Here’s a peek at just some of the super speakers who will grace TC Mobility 2021’s virtual stage.
Can mobility be accessible, equitable and profitable? We tapped three heavy hitters to tackle this hot topic: Tamika L. Butler, a community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer, Remix Co-founder and CEO, Tiffany Chu and Frank Reig, Revel co-founder and CEO.
Joby Aviation founder, JoeBen Bevirt and Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and an investor who knows a thing or two about SPACs, will share their expertise on building a startup, keeping it secret while raising funds, the future of flight and, of course, SPACs.
What do people say about their Mobility experience? Rachael Wilcox, a creative producer at Volvo Cars — and a serial TC Sessions: Mobility attendee — told us why she makes it a point to attend every year.
“I go to TC Sessions: Mobility to find new and interesting companies, make new business connections and look for startups with investment potential. It’s an opportunity to expand my knowledge and inform my work.”
TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 takes place on June 9. Early bird savings remain in effect until May 5, at 11:59 pm (PT). Buy your pass now, save money and enjoy one month of free access to Extra Crunch. Yay!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
The black curtain pulls aside and a character straight out of the movies waves hello. This is not an uncommon occurrence when I’m around Imagineers, but this time is special. The character isn’t a costume, it’s a robot. And, unlike the many animatronic figures you’ve seen in the parks, it’s not stuck in one place. No, this character is walking towards me, attached only by a thin cable used for programming.
The gait is smooth, the arms swing in a lifelike manner and the feet plant realistically. The body sways exactly as you’d expect it to. There’s no other way to say it, it’s ambling. This is Project Kiwi, a small-scale, free-roaming robotic actor — the first of its kind for Disney and a real robotics milestone.
The holy grail of themed entertainment has been established for decades now: a fully mobile, bipedal character that matches the appearance, personality and scale of the original. Various non-mobile levels of this vision have been achieved at parks around the world, including the incredibly lifelike Na’Vi Shaman, The A1000 figure that powers characters like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge’s Hondo Ohnaka and the smoothly expressive Belle from Beauty and the Beast at Tokyo Disneyland. There have also been some cool mobile experiments like the self-piloting droid “Jake”.
The pint sized character has accurately rendered textures on its face, hands and feet. It’s dressed in a distressed red flight suit that you may remember from the films. And its eyes are expressive as it looks at me and waves. This is the moment, the one that Disney Imagineers and park goers alike have been waiting decades to realize. This is a real, walk around character that is at the proper scale, kid scale.
A couple of weeks ago at Walt Disney Imagineering in Southern California, I saw just how close they finally are to making that dream come true. A bipedal platform, developed completely in house over the past 3 years by WDI researchers and roboticists — dressed up to look like a roughly two and a half foot tall Groot.
Even though the version of Kiwi that I’m looking at is Groot-flavored, it’s important to stress that this is a platform first and foremost, which means that it could take this form when it gets to the parks, or another form entirely. It’s important while developing a character to have a target character that can tell you whether or not you’re hitting an established mark of believability.
Kiwi is also is still very much a work in progress. I wouldn’t expect to see this in the wild soon, there is still a lot of work to be done on the way that Kiwi works and interacts with people and WDI does not have immediate plans to put it in the parks.
But even at this stage it’s an incredible feat of engineering that genuinely radiates that elusive characteristic that Disney always searches for with its figures: presence.
How did we get here?
I was able to speak to the lead on Project Kiwi, R&D Imagineer Principal Scott LaValley as well as Advanced Development Studio Executive SVP Jon Snoddy about how the platform came together over the past few years.
“Project KIWI started about three years ago to figure out how we can bring our smaller characters to life at their actual scale in authentic ways,” LaValley says. “It’s an exciting time for bipedal robotics and with an incredible team and our combination of technology, artistry, and magic, we are bringing characters to life that could not have happened anywhere but Disney.”
I’ve talked a bit about the unique Imagineering process in my previous pieces on how Disney builds reactive robotics, autonomous stuntbots and even entire lands. Imagineering works a lot like a startup in the way that it comes up with a problem to solve and then goes about pulling in other departments to help it get a solution. There is a remarkably ego-free nature to much of the way that WDI actually finds those solutions, too. They are as likely to find a key component off the shelf as they are to design, develop and patent it in house.
The interconnected nature of Imagineering departments like ride design, show systems, special effects, animatronics department, Tech Studio R&D and Disney Research means that they share solutions across the stack as well.
The guiding thread to all of it, of course, is storytelling. This guiding force exists at all levels of the process, keeping the project moving in the right direction — towards a better way to tell stories and transport guests.
Image Credits: Walt Disney Imagineering R&D Inc.
With Kiwi, the end goal was clear, a character that could walk on its own and interact with park guests. Unfortunately, due to the scale and complexity of the figure and the requirements for interaction and walking, no ‘off the shelf’ platforms would do. The fact is that there are actually only a handful of truly viable bipedal robotics platforms anywhere in the world and the vast majority of them are being created for industrial applications, with a handful of ‘human-scale’ solutions that are designed as marketing set pieces rather than truly autonomous systems.
So to hit that goal, Imagineering turned to R&D and LaValley’s team. LaValley had come to Disney from Boston Dynamics, where he worked on the first version of its biped robot Atlas.
The project scope was that they needed a biped robot that was battery powered and could be programmed to handle autonomous interactions with park guests and striped gestures and emotes. The team would take the next 3 years to build what they needed — much of which was custom for reasons we’ll get into shortly.
Image Credits: Walt Disney Imagineering R&D Inc.
It’s clear at a glance that Kiwi has no operator inside. The human brain is pretty good at instinctually understanding whether a space is just too small to have a person in it. In order to achieve the small size, the team had to first build a custom skeleton that had room for every motor and actuator Kiwi would need to achieve 50 degrees of freedom, all while keeping it humanoid in shape so that it could be ‘dressed up’ as any number of characters.
First came the frame. Prototypes were built from custom printed polymer and then eventually custom metal parts using industrial printers. The armatures and segments that they needed to house the critical components were just too complex to mill or cast. The cleverly printed metal skeleton is hollow throughout, allowing a ‘marrow conduit’ for air which rushes through the body cooling the motors and actuators. In the current Kiwi prototype the air comes in through the collar area of the suit, rushes throughout the body, propelled by fans embedded in the skeleton and exhausts near the bottom of the unit. Eventually it will use the clothing as a shroud to help air flow out near the feet.
Though there is some audible noise, even in this early state it is very low, allowing audio playing out of a speaker to enable conversation.
As you can see in the exclusive progress video embedded above, the lower sections were built first. Early testing around the office shows the legs and torso sneaking, bouncing, shuffling and strutting through Imagineering. This is probably the only workplace in the world where the bottom half of a torso can tiptoe past your office while you’re eating lunch and it doesn’t even merit a pause between bites.
An enormous amount of completely custom robotics work went into the Kiwi platform. In the demonstration I saw, young Groot had a safety tether and control cable for live programming but nothing on the rig itself needed support, it was free roaming with on board battery power that LaValley says hits around the 45 minute mark currently with more longevity hoped for in the final version. In fact, a next-generation skeleton is already under development that is lighter and more efficient.
Image Credits: Walt Disney Imagineering R&D Inc. / Walt Disney Imagineering R&D Inc.
The legs use a system that offers a kinetic counter-balance, allowing the force of having to move and plant a foot to be off-set, making motions more power efficient and quicker. Think of a spring loaded heavy gate that makes it easier for you to swing open — but no springs, and a robotic limb instead of a gate.
The feet plant realistically for the very simple reason that they must actually support the figure. This gives it an additional layer of believability that just doesn’t happen with externally supported characters that “fake” a foot plant. LaValley demonstrated that the figure could easily stay afoot even if it was shoved gently or if a hand was rested on its shoulder. This kind of self-balancing is something that humans do unconsciously and continuously but it must be built and programmed in to an ambulatory robot.
Many patentable inventions went into this creation. One of them is a clever system of gears that translates energy across joints, allowing them to share motors with one another even across a joint like a knee or wrist. This means fewer components and the ability to keep motor and actuator packages small and compact enough to fit underneath theming.
In order to minimize the amount of wiring throughout Kiwi — since wires are always the biggest points of failure — the team created a set of origami-like circuit boards joined by integrated flex cabling. Think of your standard computer circuit board but sliced into segments and mounted to the exterior of the hollow ‘bones’. They wrap around the limbs and other body parts, binding the control systems and motors being controlled together into a local group that reduces the amount of harnessing that needs to be spread across joints and throughout the structure.
No actuators — the components that decide how to move a limb — that exist had the capabilities that the team needed, so they built them from scratch. At one point, LaValley handed me a ring holding iteration after iteration of a dozen actuator elements. I was holding years worth of engineering, experimentation, failure and progress on a simple bit of wire twisted together at the end.
Up next for Project Kiwi is a new set of actuators that can dynamically apply torque plus added sensing capabilities for more stability and reaction to uneven ground or interactions. You can imagine that, as a free roaming character people will want to take pictures with it and I doubt kids would be able to resist running up for a hug. The skeleton must be able to sense and react quickly and smoothly to those sudden external inputs in order to stay upright and keep looking natural.
Image Credits: Walt Disney Imagineering R&D Inc. / Walt Disney Imagineering R&D Inc.
Moving from a pure IK system to a fully torque sensing system will allow for the platform to make on the fly adjustments that compensate for terrain or interaction with other performers or guests.
All of the work the team put into custom gearing, motors and actuation has paid off in spades with the ridiculously smooth and natural looking movements of Kiwi’s arms and legs. Quick waves, shrugs, dance moves and even boxing jabs all look like a real — if slightly gentle — creature is performing them.
The team also demonstrated the custom built performance software that they designed which allows Kiwi to have different kinds of gaits with personality layered on top. The bottom layer is an IK-style gait system that keeps Kiwi upright and walking, but then layering the personalities on top adds character to the walk while still maintaining stability. Bouncy, jaunty walks, limps, sad or downhearted walks, all with the other motions of arms and head contributing to a constantly shifting center of mass and momentum. The paddling ducks feet under the water is that gait system that takes the external inputs and integrates it into the walk naturally.
The current prototype software has a series of set behaviors, with a timeline that allows them to program new behaviors and actions by toggles or adjusting curves that control movement. With a series of tweaks in the software the changes become evident immediately, with Groot’s “mood” becoming immediately evident in his walk.
One moment he is bouncing along swinging his arms jauntily, clearly happy to be there. Then the next moment his arms are slumped, his head is hung and he is slowly plodding — clearly sad to be leaving the fun behind. It’s a remarkable bit of performance software.
And even though the expressive eyes are already impressive — the team is not done. Up next on the agenda is a sensory package that allows Kiwi to more fully understand the world around it and to identify people and their faces. This becomes important because eye contact is such an emotive and powerful tool to use in transporting a participant.
Even without the sensing software I can tell you that the experience of this 2.5ft Groot locking eyes with me, smiling and waving was just incredibly transportive. Multiple times throughout my interaction I completely forgot that it was a robot at all.
As I mentioned at the top, the Project Kiwi platform still has a lot of work left to do before it makes any appearances in the parks. But it’s already well on the road to being viable for things like stage performances, photo ops and eventually free roaming deployment in the parks.
That is really the vision, Snoddy says that the goal is to move the characters we love from across Disney’s pantheon into the spaces of the guests, elevating the entirety of the park to a live transportive experience, rather than a single ride or dark room. And to do it at the proper scale to make them genuine and capable of making guests believe. With these kinds of platforms, the possibilities are there to make the entire parks themselves a living breathing home for the characters, rather than the tightly controlled environments of the rides themselves.
The arc of history in this Imagineering journeys is drawn in robots. From Great Moments with Mr Lincoln, to incredibly expressive characters like the Na’Vi Shaman anchored inside a dark ride, to characters that hold up in bright, well lit spaces. Project Kiwi is the next frontier, allowing them to step off of the pedestal and right into the world of the guest.
One of the most fascinating fields in robotics currently is HRI or human-robot interaction. This multidisciplinary effort to help humans and robots communicate better is often focused on safety and awareness in industrial settings. But I’ve long had that the most incredibly interesting work in this space is being done in Imagineering R&D. Over 100 million people pass through Disney’s parks per year, and the number of opportunities that they have to react to and interact with robotic characters grows yearly. And with projects like Kiwi on the horizon, this field is going to explode with new kinds of data and learnings.
And, of course, we’ll get to meet some of our favorite characters looking and acting as real as we’ve ever seen them in our world.
