Behold Your Doom: Robospidernaut

Oh yes, this giant robotic spider with a Cylon on top is very, very real

2 min read

Behold Your Doom: Robospidernaut

Is this one seriously awesome death robot or what? Giant robotic spiders with human torsos and Cylon heads: it's not a nightmare, it's for science! 

Full disclosure: despite the dramatic angle at which this picture was taken, you're unfortunately looking at two (or maybe technically three) robots instead of just one gold spidery killing machine. The robot in the foreground is Spidernaut, which looks like this:

Spidernaut is designed for constructing and maintaining large on-orbit structures in space. NASA went with a design featuring eight 3-DOF legs so that the robot can spread out its weight (or mass, I should say, since this is space we're talking about) over as much area as possible, and with all those legs no torque is imparted when the robot moves. NASA has been talking about about a whole new class of arachnid robots like these, some of which may be able to deploy "webs" of tethers to cross larger distances in space.

The other robot (or two) in the picture at the top is Robonaut 1, mounted on top of Centaur 1. Here's the pair without a Spidernaut in front of them:

Isn't he cute? And this only the first generation of both Robotnaut and Centaur, which is a modular vehicle designed to give Robonaut some mobility (since he doesn't come with legs). You probably know all about Robonaut 2 (he's the one who's partying up on the ISS), but have you seen Centaur 2?

Centaur 2 is a pretty sweet ride, no doubt about that, but someone needs to take the hint and actually mount Robonaut on Spidernaut.  Not because it's a good idea, because it may be a terrible idea. And not because anything specific needs to be accomplished, because it probably wouldn't accomplish much. But you'd have yourself a giant robotic spider with a human torso and Cylon head, and come on, how can you not be excited about that?

[ Spidernaut ]

[ Robonaut ]

Thanks to KWC for the epic pic!

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