Mechanical engineering students turn Brian Davis’ playful classroom wish into an animatronic puppet built in his likeness
Mechanical engineering students turn Brian Davis’ playful classroom wish into an animatronic puppet built in his likeness
Brian Davis once told Maddy Reedy he had always wanted to be turned into a Muppet.
The exchange came during a conversation about dream jobs, when Reedy was taking a materials engineering class from Davis. She wanted to make animatronics. Davis, now a postdoctoral teaching scholar in mechanical engineering, had a character in mind.
Himself.
The comment stayed with Reedy long after the conversation ended.
A couple of years later, she returned with a senior project team ready to turn the unlikely idea into a working animatronic.
Fredy Herrarte, Jake Schuman and Jackson Reynolds joined Reedy on a mechanical engineering senior project with a deceptively simple goal: turning Davis’ likeness and voice into a moving character.
The students built the puppet to respond to programmed cues, using his recorded lines to give it the feel of a small animatronic show. By the time it reached Cal Poly’s Engineering Senior Project Expo, Davis’ orange likeness was ready for an audience.
Davis had a name for it, too.
“Have you seen Muppet Me?” he asked the visitors crowded around the display.
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Davis did not immediately see the concept as a senior project.
When Reedy and the team approached him, he encouraged them to look for a more traditional design project. An animatronic version of himself sounded funny and definitely interesting, though he first wondered whether it belonged in the Mechanical Engineering Department’s senior project lineup.
The students kept coming back.
Eventually, the proposal made its way through the department, and Davis signed on as the project sponsor. The team called it “The Brian Davis Show,” a name they later laser-engraved onto the show box in the Mustang ’60 Machine Shops.
The concept gave them creative freedom while raising the technical bar. The puppet had to be recognizable as Davis and move with enough personality to show that the project belonged in an engineering showcase.
Reedy began with concept art and digital sculpting. The team moved between design software, shop work and controls, guided by a central question: How do you turn a person into a character without losing what makes him familiar?
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The build started with Davis himself. The team studied his features and the kind of character they wanted to create. Reedy watched Muppet movies and began sculpting the face in ZBrush before the team moved the design into SolidWorks.
Much of the work required them to learn as they went.
Reedy had led an animatronics project for Cal Poly Amusement Park Engineers and Designers, known as CAPED, but the system in front of them was new. Herrarte put it plainly: “You gotta try new things, right?”
Reedy also reached outside Cal Poly for advice, messaging professionals through LinkedIn until she connected with a mechanical engineering manager at Universal Studios Hollywood. The team began meeting with him regularly, gaining input from someone who had worked on in-house animatronics and ride systems.
Additional advice from industry professionals shaped the material choice for Davis’ face and hands. The students had considered felt but shifted to fleece after hearing it would better withstand the motion and handling.
The head became one of the project’s biggest tests. When it finally came off the printer on Feb. 10, Herrarte felt the build turn real.
The rest of the puppet brought its own challenges. Early work with pneumatics once launched the figure off a table, and Herrarte lost his work when a program fried his computer. The scale of the build came from making the puppet’s mechanics work with the programmed routine.
The team kept wiring the body and refining a timed sequence that would run from a show box powered by drill batteries. Reedy, meanwhile, shaped the costume, altering toddler clothes with Velcro closures so they could fit around the frame.
The finished system used Bottango for timing and Arduino controls to pair Davis’ recorded voice with movement, allowing the puppet to gesture, turn its head and rise from the chair before sitting back down.
The pieces were starting to move like a character.
• • •
At Expo, the puppet had the effect the team hoped for.
Visitors stopped at the display with phones out, reacting as Davis’ orange likeness moved to his recorded voice. The team could hear side conversations forming around the table as people tried to figure out how it worked.
Reynolds recognized the reaction from his time working at Disney, comparing the scene to another kind of opening day.
“It feels like a grand opening of a ride at Disney,” he said. The energy in the room made the late nights feel worth it.
Davis had seen pieces of the project along the way, but Expo gave him his first full look at the finished puppet.
“They took it so much further than what I could have imagined,” he said.
Before the event, Davis had rerecorded lines on a better microphone after the team asked for more audio. Hearing his own voice come through the character added to the effect.
“The sound files sound like sound files from an actual animatronics show,” Davis said. “It sounds exactly like an animatronic.”
The validation helped the students see their work as more than a one-time build. Schuman watched people gather around the puppet and saw a path forward.
“This is what I want to do for a career,” he said.
Davis did not hesitate. He told Schuman the field was “100% a career path,” then offered the team an even stronger assessment: “This isn’t like a professional animatronic; this is a professional animatronic.”
After graduation, those paths began taking shape. Reynolds is interning with Walt Disney Imagineering, while Herrarte and Schuman are now with Walt Disney World Resort. Reedy is at Daniel’s Wood Land in Paso Robles, continuing the character-focused fabrication that helped lead her to the project in the first place.
The puppet will stay with Davis, a finished version of the classroom comment Reedy held onto until a team could bring it to life.
By Emily Slater
