Ride the Giant, Inflatable Ant-Roach Robot

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What would it look like if some mad Dr. Moreau combined an anteater, a cockroach and a bounce house? You’d get the Ant-Roach, the 15-foot inflatable walking robot.

It was developed by Otherlab in San Francisco, a small lab that has done some pretty cool things with what it calls “pneubotics,” including this inflatable robotic arm. The Ant-Roach walks by receiving commands via laptop, which activate the “muscles”–textile-based actuators that contract upon being filled with compressed air.

The result is a noisy, weird-looking robot that can support up to 1,000 lbs despite only weighing 70 lbs. We can only imagine how many Silicon Valley children’s birthdays Ant-Roach will be attending this year.

[via IEEE Spectrum, Hizook]