Intel Taps Student's Robot for Processor Demo
University of Arizona engineering student creates a six-legged Atom-powered bot that can "learn" to walk on its own, and Intel brings it along on the company road show.
Matt Bunting, right, examines his hexapod robot.
While I've always been a little scared of spiders, watching student Matt Bunting's hexapod robot dancing has all but cured me. Maybe it's the combination of the folk guitar and little leg sways in the below video, but all of a sudden, spiders (at least the robotic kind) look so damn cute.
Cuteness aside, the hexapod bot has gotten some attention from high places. Two days after Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical engineering senior, posted a YouTube video of his bot, Intel ordered two of them to promote its Atom processors at trade shows and engineering meetings. The robot uses Intel's 1.60GHz Atom Z530 and US15W chipset. It runs on the Ubuntu open-source operating system.
