wind-powered fluidic-logic beachwalking robots

[eub]

The fabulous jcreed points out Theo Jansen and strandbeest.com:

Jansen is an artist and engineer who make ridiculously awesome wind-powered beach-walking robots, using thin PVC pipes, plastic tubing, custom valves, and plastic bottles. If you've ever read like A. K. Dewdney books that have cute descriptions of how you could theoretically build logic gates from pneumatic effects, this guy's work is a realization of that, as well as containing cool pure engineering solutions to problems of walking and detecting water, loose ground etc.

The logic-gate stuff is pretty amazing by itself. During the talk demoed three NOT gates in serial oscillating madly as a huge supply of compressed air churned through their orgy of mutual negation, and his actual robots have relatively sophisitcated control systems. One will turn around when it hits the ocean, count its steps, keep walking until it hits loose sand, turn around, and turn around again before it hits the ocean, because it knows by dead reckoning where the ocean was.

The website does not have as much of the lovely engineering as that talk did, but still, in the movies, you will be pleased by "Animaris Currens Ventosa walking".