Photo via Tony Dyson's website
Watch: Meet the Animator Behind Star Wars and 'Jurassic Park'Tony Dyson, the robot builder and special effects wizard who built the much-beloved R2 unit from Star Wars, was found dead in his home on the Maltese island of Gozo, according to the Times of Malta. Friends of the 68-year-old British professor initially phoned the police, concerned his front door was open. There is no suspicion of foul play—Dyson likely died of natural causes.Dyson, who owned the UK's White Horse Toy Company at the time and also worked on films such as Moonraker, was brought on by George Lucas during production for Star Wars to build R2-D2 from blueprints drawn up by conceptual designer Ralph McQuarrie. He built eight versions of R2-D2, some remote-controlled and others for the actor Kenny Baker to man, the BBC reports.Dyson's creation is, as he put it himself on his website, "arguably one of the most famous robot[s] in the world" and has starred in all seven Star Wars films. He wrote that building the R2-D2 robots for Star Wars was "one of the most exciting periods of my life."R2 was one of the first inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon, and in 2004, it beat out Futurama's Bender, Crow from MST3K, and Doctor Who's Daleks for the title of the world's favorite robot.