3D Printed Spider Robot Looks As Scary As The Real Thing

If you’ve never been a fan of spiders (especially ninja ones, those you don’t see until they get you), you’re not going to like what this Norwegian engineer did. In fact, if you saw his latest creation, you’d run for the hills #machinemagic

Kare Halvorsen just created a spider robot agile enough to give you chills. Halvorsen used 18 motors and a 3D printer to give his hexapod life. The engineers described the whole process on his website, saying that “[MX-Phoenix] is a little inspired by my first hexapod robot I made 10 years ago. It’s kinda “back to the basics”, but this time I’ll have more focus on my primary goals that I didn’t achieve on my first robots: A more dynamic gait engine and terrain adaptation.”

To take it to completion, the engineer printed the body sections in ABS and “Acetone vapor-treated”. This made the overall design of the robot look credible and helped reduce the final weight. How heavy is the MX-Phoenix now? Just 4,72 kg. Even so, the spider bot has good balance. It can walk on tricky terrain just fine, using its six legs to stay upright even on uneven rocks. Moreover, Haloversen says it can climb down stairs with no difficulty.

If he hadn’t filmed the whole thing, we wouldn’t have believed it:

There you go! Of course, the spider bot is not autonomous. Its creator controls it with a huge remote:

If you look now at the original Phoenix, you can see the upgrades Halvorsen made: