How robots could end animal captivity in zoos and marine parks Just Might Work

This might look like a real dolphin, but it's a robot. Nobody believed it was a robot. Everybody believed it was real. It's an impressive feat of engineering, but it's a much bigger deal than that. This robot could save the marine park industry and free the 3,000 dolphins, whales, and porpoises that are basically... Locked up. You can sugarcoat it, you can paint their tank, but they're literally locked up. And that's the complicated problem with zoos and marine parks. On one hand, we lock up wild animals for our own entertainment. On the other, they provide the only venue for everyone to see and interact with the natural world, while also contributing millions to conservation and rehabilitation efforts. But what if this robot could keep the upside and eliminate the downside? It's easy to kind of demonize the marine park industry as a whole, but we don't think that's the answer. We just want to transition them to the future in a much more sustainable way. All right, you guys ready? Could this robot dolphin end animal captivity and be the future of marine parks? She thinks so. This is Just Might Work, a show about surprising solutions to our biggest problems. So back here we have our archives of all our aquatic animals we created. This is the inside of one of the sharks from Deep Blue Sea. Here are actually the swordfish from The Perfect Storm, as well as the shark that comes on board and grabs Mark Wahlberg. So this is a snake from Anaconda, the feature film Anaconda starring Jennifer Lopez. Meet Walcanti. I'm the founder and CEO of Edge Innovations. We started our life as a Hollywood special effects company building really sophisticated animatronics. Back here, this is actually the original mold from Free Willy. The kernel of our current initiative really did start with Free Willy. 20 years ago, Walt and Roger Holtzberg built the first free swimming animatronic. No big deal. Our dolphin, we call him Del. I have my dream job. I'm a vice president creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering. I pitched the idea of a next generation attraction for water parks. I reached out to Walt and said, do you think it would be possible to take your motion picture animals, create a new kind of Waldo control system and software, and use them as real time animatronic figures? The mechanical challenge was hard enough, but the key to making it all work was to create something that felt real. You don't necessarily think about it, but there's no blueprint for creating a dolphin. So we studied tons and tons and tons of footage, looking actually at motion profiles, which ultimately relate to accelerations and torques. Inside, they're all machines. They're all joints and servos and microprocessors and stuff. But what makes a dolphin or an orca or a shark or a beluga distinctive is actually the art and knowledge that we bring to it. A lot of interesting things happened when we piloted these attractions. All of the fish in the entire aquarium believed the dolphin was real. The sharks avoided it. The turtles were terrified of it. The small fish schooled underneath it. But the dolphins can echolocate, so they certainly could tell there were servos and plastic in this thing in the tank. Those early successes led them to the most important question. If the robot could fool the animals in the tank, could it fool us? We're going to turn next tonight to the sudden change, of course, for SeaWorld. Bowing to pressure, they have announced they are now ending their popular killer whale performances. In the U.S., the ethics of marine parks have been debated for a while. Exposes like Blackfish elevated the issue in the public consciousness. There are only a handful of marine parks left in the U.S., and attendance has steadily declined. But that perception shift hasn't been the case everywhere. In China, business is booming. As of 2019, there are 80 marine parks, with 27 others being built. And right now, a third of the world's captive dolphins, whales, and porpoises are in Chinese marine parks. It's an unfortunate trend for the fate of these animals. But it has created the perfect opportunity for Edge Innovations to show there's a new way forward. About a year and a half ago, out of the blue, I get an email from a producer working on a large oceanarium initiative in mainland China. And they've just done the math on what it's going to take to acquire a pretty large number of large marine animals. And somebody said, boy, I wonder if you could do this animatronically. We currently are finalizing a contract for an installation in a major Chinese coastal city. Our vision is not just to, like, replace a real dolphin with a robot dolphin. We have seen dolphins and orcas doing acrobatics in arenas for 50 years. We want to create a whole new set of experiences that this technology allows. There are some limitations to the current iteration. It's attached to a wire for now and is controlled mostly by an operator. It's also expensive. But the numbers pay off over time. While this dolphin costs between $3 and $5 million to make, it's far more economical in the long run. As it turns out, the cost of entry of animatronic animals is significantly more than buying their live counterparts. But over a 10-year lifespan, it saves many, many tens of millions of dollars to only have to plug your animals in at night to recharge. What are you guys thinking about next? Well, we're thinking about version 3.0 of the dolphin, where Del could just be in an aquarium for 8 to 10 hours on her own, swimming completely on AI. What may be the most powerful feature of the robot is also impossible to measure. And that's the opportunity to actually interact with a wild animal. Experiential education with characters that you create, like Del the dolphin, is the deepest and most effective type of education. Does anybody want to come in the water and have a picture with Del? With our animatronic creatures, they've bonded in a way that that kid is never going to forget. And our hope is that that love and that feeling is going to make her want to protect those animals when she grows up. We actually want to expand ways for people to fall in love with these animals, which at the core is really what the mission is and should be for all these marine parks. If we can build a robot dolphin like this, then why not tigers that we can touch, or sharks we can actually swim with? Maybe even dinosaurs. We'd love to bring back the Jurassic seas. There was incredible marine life in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago that disappeared. We live on a fragile planet, and we want to use that experience of recreating the past oceans to let people be entertained and enjoy, but to point out the fact that nothing is given. These things are fragile, they're all interrelated, and we've got to take care of the oceans. Thanks for watching. For more Just Might Work episodes, subscribe. And check out our story about the robot that could clean up space.