The Robot Marauder is a walking, skating, danciong hexapod robot standing 1.5m (5') tall, weighing 75kg (165lbs). The robot recently won "Best of Show" at RoboGames 2023, winning the Gold Medal. For the RoboGames competition the robot was upgraded with high density NeoPixel addressable LED strips mounted underneath the 3D printed leg covers providing a rainbow lighting effect and a robot carry and release mechanism for the smaller robot Blader.

Marauder had the opportunity to showcase its abilities in the combat cage at RoboGames 2023. These include skating, dancing, and deploying Blader. See the showcase below:

Marauder Showcase At RoboGames 2023:

 

New for RoboGames 2023 was a mechanism for deploying the smaller but similar robot Blader. Video of Marauder deploying Blader can be seen below.

Marauder Replicates At RoboGames 2023:

 

Marauder as "Big Mama" at the 2015 IDF Keynote:

 

The Marauder Robot Platform was designed and built for the 2015 Intel IDF CEO Keynote speech where it was billed as the "Big Mama" spider robot. The video of the Keynote can be viewed below.


      Marauder onstage at the 2015 IDF Keynote with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich

Marauder scales up the Glider platform by a factor of 2. In order to support the additional mass and scale the motors have been upgraded to the Dynamixel Pro range but the two robots share an underlying design approach.


      Marauder dancing onstage with legs lit by LED strip

Marauder weighs approximately 75Kg and is capable of walking, skating and dancing. It stands almost 1.5m tall and is over 2m long. An array of 8 LiPo batteries runs the 24V power bus, allowing the robot to run, walk, skate and dance for over 2 hours without needing a recharge.

This revolutionary platform is now available to researchers and educators who are interested in working with walking robots. The Python based SDK contains a variety of different gaits and behaviours, with room for many more. In addition, stereo cameras provide for stereoscopic machine vision, with full WIFI and Bluetooth connectivity for off-robot processing. The robot runs locally on a quad core Intel Core i7 running Ubuntu Linux, providing plenty of MIPS for self contained, autonomous algorithms.

 

Skating test before the 2015 IDF Keynote:

 

Big Mama performance:

 

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