Giant Walking Hexapod Is A Non-Threatening Nightmare

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Please return your seats to their full and upright position, and then jump out of them and run away as quickly as possible, screaming the entire way. My recent fortune cookie message of “A hexapod will invade your sleep cycle” was understandably ignored. Until now.

Matt Denton and his company, Micromagic Systems, have been working with robots and animatronics in the film and TV world for over a decade now, and he’s been working on hexapods of all sizes for nearly as many years. Once the smaller versions worked with precision, it was time to up the ante, and after four years of focused research and development, we now we have the MANTIS! This nightmare on six legs will slowly walk towards you, and while it might not have any lasers, phasers or tasers attached, it quite possibly could wow you into incapacitation.

At nearly nine feet tall, with a fifteen-foot working envelope and a weight of just under two tons, this is a monster of a machine, and is currently the biggest all-terrain hexapod robot around. The fact that it’s got a 2.2-liter Turbo Diesel engine doesn’t exactly ward off the worries of an eventual takeover. Granted, all we’d probably have to do is run beneath the Mantis’ legs, but it’s probably got a net-throwing arm or a release hatch for a load of marbles that would make running away pure torture. If in trouble, please call the Russian ostrich robot to assist you.

The next time I’m somewhere and a song that sounds anything like dubstep plays, I’m going to reinvent the robot dance by mimicking the Mantis. Internet sensation, here I come!