How a Spider Robot Leads a Student to Intel

Posted by moezilla on February 19, 2010

Intel is now discussing a dancing humanoid robot project with the Arizona college student who built the famous dancing hexapod “spider” robot!

It got him an “A” in his cognitive robotics class — and 100,000 hits on YouTube — but in a new interview, Matt Bunting explains how he’s culminating a lifelong fascination with robots. He once mounted a camera on a tracked vehicle that would search under beds for his cat, and when he was 13, he sent a camera bot into the girl’s locker room! (”I attached a wireless video camera to the little wheeled rover which fed back to a small battery powered TV…”)

Now he’s building robots that can visually map their surroundings to plot a course or evolve a new navigation strategy every time they power up – and he’s considering how to program an “emotion” function.

“It would be really cool to have a hexapod that is essentially a pet in my house…”