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Sunday, August 5, 2012

Giant Walking Spider Machines - Mondo Spider and Stompy The Giant Rideable Walking Robot

Mondo Spider

Burning Man 2008 - Giant Walking Spider Machine

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTHI8o5ZOFk&feature=related

Official home of the world's first zero emission walking vehicle

1,700 lbs of Mechanical Mayhem

De-Inventing The Wheel

This ride-able mechanical walking machine was designed by a team of artists and engineers as an industrial metal beast destined to rock Burningman and the world of kinetic sculpture. Inspired by Vancouver Junkyard Wars, this giant hydraulic monster was hewn from steel with passion and precision. Call it robot... call it biomimicry... call it what you will...

We call it... The MONDO SPIDER.

It was originally shown at Burning Man 2006: Hope and Fear.

CODE Live

Mondo got into the Olympic Spirit as an art installation at CODE Live, the Cultural Olympiad’s Digital Edition. CODE featured 18 days and three venues of digital art and music from around the world, and helped to sponsor our Zero Emissions facelift.

Read More...
http://www.mondospider.com/

Stompy: The Giant, Rideable Walking Robot

Project Hexapod: Rowing Achieved!

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=raRQu9Un3_I

Meet Stompy: An open-source, 18ft wide, 4,000 pound, 6-legged hydraulic robot that you can ride.

Launched: Aug. 03, 2012
Funding ends: Sep. 02, 2012
Remind Me

Our Dream

We dream of a world where imagination becomes reality simply because enough passionate people decide that an idea has merit. We dream of robots of all shapes and sizes being made across the globe, because the high-end technology needed to make them is simplified, generalized, and made publicly accessible.

The first step in achieving that dream for us is building a rideable, 18 foot wide, 4,000 pound, 6-legged, engine-powered hydraulic walking robot named Stompy, and sharing exactly how we did it with the world.

Who We Are

We are Project Hexapod. We’re a team of 3 instructors, 1 TA, and 15 students based out of a makerspace in Somerville, Massachusetts called Artisan’s Asylum. We’ve spent the last four months running a class on how to design giant robots, and Stompy is the end result. Our instructors (Gui Cavalcanti, James Whong, and Dan Cody) are professional roboticists who have designed military and commercial robot legs, arms, prosthetics, walking machines, and more. Our TA (Adam Bercu) is a national champion Battlebots builder, and our students come from backgrounds ranging as widely as engineers working for defense contractors to professional programmers to electronics enthusiasts.

You may have heard of us and Stompy before, a couple of months back – we were written up in Wired, Boing Boing, Hack A Day, DVICE, Hizook, the Boston Globe, and Engadget, among others.

Why You Should Care

First of all, we’re building a giant walking robot that you can ride, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll be showing it off at a festival or fair near you. Depending on your level of support, you may even get to ride it or drive it - how about that?

Beyond that, though, your support for Project Hexapod will drive a personal robotics revolution (if we have anything to say about it). The past twenty years have seen an explosion of productivity in hobbyist robotics made possible by cheap, easy to use microcontrollers and RC servos. The hobbyist community has built a wealth of knowledge and infrastructure around these components, but RC servos severely limit the size of robot you can build.

Project Hexapod wants to make large-scale robots easier to build, and inspire people to build them.

Stompy is 6 giant steps towards that dream. Once we finish this robot, we’re releasing our plans, our CAD, our diagrams, the presentations from all the lectures we gave in class, our lists of materials and parts, everything. The construction and control techniques we're using will drop the cost of controlled hydraulics by an order of magnitude or two from where they are now, and will make giant robots affordable to small groups of enthusiasts everywhere.

The robot isn't just being built for fun, though - it has incredibly practical purposes, as well. With 6 force-sensitive legs and a ground clearance of 6 feet, the robot will be able to walk over broken terrain that varies from mountainous areas, to rubble piles, to water up to 7 or 8 feet deep - everywhere existing ground vehicles can't go. Not only that, but while navigating such terrain, Stompy could carry 1,000 pounds at 2-3 mph, and up to 4,000 pounds at 1 mph. This is important because in disaster areas like Haiti's Port Au Prince, it's taken more than three years to clear the rubble out of some areas - meaning that throughout that entire time, people have had to be rescued or resupplied by helicopter, because no ground vehicle could reach them. Stompy (and the technology it represents) could easily reach people who can't be reached by any other means in a natural disaster.