At Berkeley, they’re coming up with new ways to make their itty bitty hexapods. These are basically tiny flatpacked bodies cut from cardboard. The end goal is to not only make them smaller and faster to build, but to reduce the friction in the joints. You can download the files on their site as well as download movies of them in action. For a larger and somewhat less complicated flatpacked robot, check out the flatpacked 2 motor walker.
[thanks Thuli]
Those are so cute!!!
-but you can’t get them wet.
the itsy bitsy spider, crawled up the water spout
down came the rain, and shorted the spider out
holy shit those are small
I want to make one! So damn awesome
@ supershwa: Well done!
@strider_mt2k: There’s a fiberglass model on the same page – I’m sure that’s plenty waterproof.
The black one (according to the site) is carbon fiber. However, water destroying the cardboard is probably a secondary concern. At the scale these robots are running at, the surface tension of water droplets will probably gum up the works.
Nice project!
I upload the video to YT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4oufPv6RvI&fmt=18
Wah! I didn’t know that the youtube’s links are automatically embeded.
it looks like a piece of a Replicator! Now if they could only self-assemble with adjacent units ..