OREANDA-NEWS. May 13, 2016. That Mickey Mouse greeting you at Disney World may one day contain a robot instead of a very petite person.

Disney Research, the company's international network of research labs to "push the scientific and technological forefront of innovation" at the company, is working on what it calls a "hybrid hydrostatic transmission and human-safe haptic telepresence robot." That's a very wordy way to say the robot essentially mimics the moves of its puppet master, an operator viewing everything through the eyes (i.e. cameras) of the robot.

"The operator is visually immersed in the robot's physical workspace," the researchers wrote in a technical paper for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation on May 16.

Cameras mounted on the robot, which is wearing a "Jimmy" nametag, stream video to an operator who's wearing a head-mounted display (which appears to be an Oculus virtual reality headset). The operator's motions are mimicked by the robot, and the haptics feedback, which is sort of like the iPhone's 3D Touch, allows the operator to almost feel what the robot is feeling. This lets the robot handle delicate objects, carry out precise motion and interact with humans.