Edge Innovations is a company that makes animatronic animals for theme parks (think the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland). About a year and a half ago, Edge was contacted by a theme park producer from New Zealand who was working on some new oceanariums in China. They wanted to know if Edge could leverage modern technology to build a lifelike dolphin so that the parks wouldn’t have to go out and capture real ones. The result is an incredibly lifelike robot dolphin. It weighs 550 pounds and is 8.5 feet long and has a battery that can provide eight to 10 hours of swimming time per charge.
What truly sets this dolphin apart, though, is its use of artificial intelligence. It can be programmed to mimic natural dolphin behavior, such as expressing curiosity in objects of interest and surfacing randomly four times a minute to breathe. And it can also be controlled by a joystick in order to put on shows or provide educational experiences.
“Our goal at the highest level is not to make [the marine park] industry go away, but to help them reimagine the way they do their entertainment and their education,” said Edge Creative Director Roger Holzberg.
