Walt Disney Imagineering Shares How Robotic Olaf Learned to Walk on a Boat and More Using NVIDIA Tec

Walt Disney Imagineering sent their self-walking Olaf on a field trip to NVIDIA GTC, the world’s largest AI conference, where the jovial snowman joined NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang onstage at his keynote. Olaf Closes Out NVIDIA GTC Keynote NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang closed out his nearly two-hour March 2026 keynote address with a segment on physical AI and robotics, highlighting one particular case study: the self-walking animatronic Olaf coming to both World of Frozen lands. NVIDIA worked with Disney Research on their proprietary Kamino simulator, a GPU-based physics solver that trains robots via thousands of parallel environments, allowing the robot to learn through deep reinforcement in simulation. Olaf was used to demonstrate how this translates to navigating real-world obstacles and terrain, with examples showing a collision with a cart and walking through snow....