A new patent has a striking resemblance to a Star Wars droid…
Disney Parks is working on something robotic with wheels and it looks very square. A patent recently covered on the excellent website, Blog Mickey, shows two versions of a potential robot that supposedly would navigate Disney theme parks. Here’s the design:
Particularly with the image on the right, I had an immediate thought on what looked like. Yes, I know that this is supposedly a storage unit that rolls to a guest with their stuff… a mobile locker if you will. However, I can’t even begin to imagine this thing navigating the theme parks in crowds to haul stuff for guests. At scale, there’s no practical way this could possibly work. But hotels are a different story. And one particular hotel could use something like this for far more than just carrying souvenirs. That’s why the image on the right caught my attention. It looks a little like the picture below:
In fact, the design in the patent and the design in the lower image are so similar that you can see the protrusion or “skirt” near the bottom matches up perfectly. The patent has a sleek computer over where the retro Star Wars panel is, but they’re the same thing in the same place. Even the wheels are similarly small. That’s not something you would want in a theme park where the device might have to go over something like the divots for the trolley on Main Street USA.
So what is that little dark box that the patent seems to be modeled after? Well, it’s a MSE-6 Series Repair Droid from the original Star Wars movie. It appears on the Death Star and it sometime called a Mouse Droid. Interesting, eh? Did Blog Mickey accidentally show off Disney’s plans to add a mobile version of the MSE-6 to (almost definitely) the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel?
It’s something worth keeping an eye on. Great job, Blog Mickey!
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