For the past three years, Ken Rinaldo, associate professor of art in Ohio State University’s Art and Technology program, has been working on a design to create a new method of robotic movement. With a commission from the Lifelike AV Festival 06 England (an electronics arts festival in the United Kingdom) and collaboration with Matt Howard and Ross Baldwin (two former students of Rinaldo) the series premiered in Lifelike 06 in Sunderland England.

      Key to this success was help from the product development specialists, Laser Reproductions and the innovative use of DSM Somos stereolithography plastics. The ability to choose a particular plastic with specific degrees of flexibility allowed the idea to succeed. Also key were microprocessors and sensors from Parallax Inc. in California.

A joint effort

      The Autotelematic Spider Bots evolved from the leg joints up. The critical piece of the design was to construct an efficient robotic joint that allowed a highly fluid motion while reducing the number of motors necessary to achieve the fluidity. One common method for effecting motion of hexapod robotic legs is to use a series of servo motors at each joint, sometimes as many as two motors per joint, so for one leg with multiple degrees of motion you might have four motors per leg. This gets heavy and expensive when talking about robots with six legs as you could easily have 24 motors per robot.

            Instead, Rinaldo’s unique design uses motors and pull string mechanics in...

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