Creative Hardware
A Disney-Inspired Droid Walks Because a Simulation Pushed It Down Thousands of Times
OpenBDX is an open-source, builder-community version of Disney's bipedal BDX droid, documented on Make: by project lead Jaime Machuca. Its walking gait comes from PPO reinforcement learning in simulation (MJLab, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim), exported to ONNX and run on two onboard Nvidia Jetson Orin NX modules. A curriculum of pushes, rough terrain, and randomized friction and motor response trained the policy to recover balance while keeping the droid's hand-animated 'personality' intact — and the team reports it transferred to the real robot with behavior close to simulation.