This Guy Is Building a Real Baymax Robot and It Is So Endearing

Big Hero 6 wasn’t the most amazing movie ever made, but it did introduce most of us to Baymax and Baymax is amazing. Ostensibly some kind of robot that looks like if Apple made an inflatable plushie, Baymax is a huge synthetic being with an even huger synthetic heart. I love Baymax and presumably you do, too. That’s why you’ll want to check out this real-life Baymax robot being built by Brae Barnes.

This robot won’t have the questionable physics of the Baymax we saw in Big Hero Six and will instead be rigid. That makes sense, since Barnes needs it to actually exist. Otherwise, it is pretty darn screen-accurate.

Barnes is starting the project with Baymax’s most important asset: his head. That’s what this first video covers. While Baymax is stylistically minimalistic, he is very expressive. In the movie, that is thanks primarily to head movement and blinking. So, Barnes put a lot of effort into perfecting those. The neck contains three beefy servo motors that can pitch, roll, and yaw the entire head. In addition, more servo motors let it blink the upper and lower eyelids on both sides.

Those servo motors operate under the control of an Arduino UNO Rev3 board and that receives movement commands from one of my favorite programs: Bottango. That is software built specifically for DIY animatronics projects and it is really powerful. You essentially get a timeline with keyframes, similar to 2D animation software, that dictate motor positions at specific moments, with the software filling in the transitions between. You can also save sequences to trigger at will, which is what Barnes did for his Baymax bot.

Barnes wants Baymax to actually be useful and act as a medical assistant. To do that, it will essentially be performing what has become pretty standard offline stuff: voice-to-text, prompt generation, LLM magic, response, and text-to-speech. But while it is doing all of that, Baymax can act according to the physical animations programmed in Bottango.

This is just the beginning and Barnes has a lot more planned. He hopes to complete the project and create a fully formed Baymax, so be sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel to keep tabs on the progress.