While at the park, the service members had the chance to explore attractions and participate in Disneyland's daily flag ceremony. Disney's Imagineers are working on a new animatronic of iconic American visionary Walt Disney, but some members of his family have opposing views about whether it celebrates his legacy or dehumanizes him. Disney's Main Street Opera House plans to unveil a new theme park attraction called Walt Disney – A Magical Life, featuring an audio-animatronic of the company's founder. But Joanna Miller, one of Disney's grandchildren, slammed the idea of an animatronic as "dehumanizing" in a viral Facebook post. Among her claims, she suggested that her grandfather had told early Imagineer Sam McKim he never wanted to be commemorated with an animatronic.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the so-called normal people are often nonessential. We get in the way, we muck things up, we need help, we get turned to dust and in the case of last year's "WandaVision," we mortals exist mostly to be playthings for those with powers. Disney California Adventure's Avengers Campus aims to flip the script. Superheroes, they're just like us, the land argues. They get captured, they need our help, they make mistakes and sometimes they just have to do dreary, daily work.

Move over Spot, there's a new adorable robot in town, and this one may one day convince you, or more likely your kid, that their favorite Disney character is real. In a lengthy new piece, TechCrunch has detailed Project Kiwi, an in-development robotics platform from the company's Imagineering research and development studio. The result of now more than three years of work, it's a small robot that can move and act on its own and take the form of many different characters -- including, as you can see, Baby Groot. With Project Kiki, Imagineering set out to create a robotic actor that could one day interact with Disney theme parks guests and make them feel like they're face-to-face with their favorite characters. When the team started work on the project, there weren't any robots up to that task, so they began making their own.

When you enter Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, the 14-acre expansion coming to Disneyland early this summer, you are faced with a choice. Walk around a bend -- and under an archway crafted to look centuries old -- to discover the starship the Millennium Falcon, nestled comfortably under hand-sculpted mountains designed to evoke the petrified forests of New Mexico. Or wander into a marketplace, one inspired by Moroccan and Turkish bazaars. Intergalactic creatures are said to live in the ramshackle, factory-like apartments above the shops, here presented as stalls, creating a cacophony of life and noise. Consider this the "Star Wars" equivalent of Main Street, U.S.A, but instead of quaint stores there are mysterious cat-like creatures in cages and toys that feel patched together from found parts. If you bypass the town you'll enter a forest where the Resistance, the "good guys" in the "Star Wars" universe, have set up a camp, hiding ships among shrubbery and building a base inside alien ruins -- a twisting cave where digital schematics clash with remnants of a long-lost civilization.

For over 50 years, Disneyland and its sister parks have been a showcase for increasingly technically proficient versions of its "animatronic" characters. First pneumatic and hydraulic, and more recently fully electronic, these figures create a feeling of life and emotion inside rides and attractions, in shows and, increasingly, in interactive ways throughout the parks. The machines they're creating are becoming more active and mobile in order to better represent the wildly physical nature of the characters they portray within the expanding Disney universe. And a recent addition to the pantheon could change the way that characters move throughout the parks and influence how we think about mobile robots at large. I wrote recently about the new tack Disney was taking with self-contained characters that felt more flexible, interactive and, well, alive than "static," pre-programmed animatronics.

The process of making a Disney park feel alive is most easily encapsulated in animatronic figures. These hydraulic, pneumatic and now electric figures have been a fixture at Disneyland since the 60s. Since then, massive advancements have been made in control systems, movement architecture and programming. The most advanced animatronic figures like the Na'Vi Shaman in Disney World's Na'vi River Journey are plain and simply robots. But not every animatronic in the parks can be a simple pneumatic connected to a bulky master system or a highly advanced and complex robotic masterwork.