14 DAY TRIAL // Do-it-yourself products usually come in a box, with all the parts in need of just minor tinkering to be put together. There are some which are much more sophisticated than assembling a desk though, and the Geoweaver robot in the video up there definitely qualifies.
In truth, it's not really a robot. Actually, it is, but its real function is that of a 3D printer. Only that unlike normal ones, which look like glorified crates (with few exceptions), this one is a six-legged robot.
Instead of moving a printing head over an internal surface, to shape the extruder, this one moves around and prints things by means of a modified glue gun.
The Geoweaver was invented by Jia Wu, Jeffrey M. Maeshiro, Mary H. Sek, all of them students from CCA, the California College of the Arts.
Had this been a Kickstarter project, or something found on Indiegogo, the three students would have asked for monetary pledges in exchange for going commercial and shipping the thing to your mailbox.
It's not, though. The team only came up with the idea and decided to release the instructions to the public. You can find said instructions on aptly named website Instructables.
The Geoweaver (also called Servo Killer, Eater of Shields, Melter of Wires, and Destroyer of Regulators) has 12 servos, and an attached glue gun extruder.
Professor Jason Kelly Johnson (the overseer of the project during the 60 days it took to complete it) wrote the Arduino-to-Firefly firmata that runs it.
The six-legged, walking 3D printer controls the extruder like a pendulum, using 2 servos, and covers a basic XY plane, though curved to the surface of a sphere.
All in all, the six-legged 3D printer is a very complicated piece of work, but it might give the military and big corporations ideas for how to build those multi-legged robotic fortresses that so often show up in science fiction.
