Walt Disney Imagineering says guests at Disney parks and aboard Disney ships around the world should expect more free-roaming robotic characters in the future. The promise came from Kyle Laughlin, SVP of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, during the company’s appearance at NVIDIA GTC 2026 in March 2026, where the self-walking robotic Olaf made his public debut alongside NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
What Disney Actually Said. Laughlin was direct. “The speed at which we’re able to create new characters and get them in front of our guests is unprecedented,” he said. “We are working to bring more emotive, expressive, and surprising characters to guests at our parks and ships around the world.”
That language does not read like a one-off achievement. It reads like a roadmap. Disney is not describing Olaf as a single research experiment. It is describing a new pipeline, one where the time it takes to build and deploy a robotic character has been dramatically compressed.
Why Speed Matters for Park Guests. Behind that faster pace is the Kamino simulator, a tool Disney Research built alongside NVIDIA and Google DeepMind. Kamino lets a robotic character train through thousands of simulated environments at once, which is how Olaf learned to walk, balance on a moving boat, and recover from collisions in hours rather than months. What used to take an enormous amount of time now happens fast enough that Disney can realistically think about getting more characters through that process and into parks.
The BDX Droids at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge were the first big step in Disney’s free-roaming robotic character program. Olaf is the next. Based on what Imagineering has said, neither of them is meant to be the last.
What “Emotive, Expressive, and Surprising” Looks Like. Those three words from Laughlin are worth paying attention to. Emotive and expressive points to characters that perform, not just navigate. Surprising suggests, Disney is not just after familiar faces doing expected things. They want characters that catch guests off guard in the best possible way.
Moritz Bächer, lab director of Disney Research, put it this way during a GTC session: “For us, it’s not just about functional autonomy. It’s about believable autonomy. You want to believe that this is a character onstage and not just functionally going from A to B.” He added that the goal is for guests to feel like they can co-direct the story, not just watch it.
That is a very different kind of park moment than anything a costume character or a traditional animatronic can offer
Laughlin specifically named parks and ships in the same breath, which matters. Olaf already proved the technology can work on a rocking boat by training to balance on an unstable surface for his lagoon show at World of Frozen in Disneyland Paris. That test opened the door to deployments well beyond a traditional park setting.
With Olaf debuting at World of Frozen on March 29, 2026, Disney Parks guests are about to get their first real look at this next generation of character. If what Imagineering is saying holds up, it will not be a long wait before they see more.
Disney Says a Wave of New Robotic Characters Is Coming to Parks and Ships
For the latest on what is coming to Disney parks, visit fantasylandnews.com.
