What’s Scarier Than a Robot Spider? A Robot Spider with a Flamethrower

Peter Sripol is a YouTuber known for building all manner of prop-driven land, air, and sea vehicles — both manned and unmanned. As such, he’s an expert on integrating and controlling brushless electric motors in all sorts of ways. But, he wanted to learn more about servo-actuated robotics, and so he built a hexapod robot kit. Of course, it’s Halloween season, and a spider-like robot wasn’t creepy enough. So, he decided to turn his robot into a terrifying flamethrowing bit of nightmare fuel.

Sripol doesn’t say in the video what kit he used for the build, but it appears to be a fairly standard mass-produced hexapod robot kit that you can get from retailers like Amazon. Sripol experimented with two different kits — one costing about $500 and the other $150 — but wasn’t too happy with either one. Poor quality control and a lack control software made them pretty much unusable without additional work.

Eventually, however, Sripol did get the larger of the two hexabots working — or at least walking vaguely on command. From there, he added a jack-o’-lantern and a small plastic skeleton on top of the robot. Inside the skeleton’s mouth is a gas line, which likely feeds lighter fluid. When it does, it squirts past a Zippo lighter that ignites the fluid. No word about whether the military is planning on using it for psychological warfare, but it definitely looks scary enough for Halloween.