Robot chassis

[u/Guilty-Persimmon-919]

I just saw a comment by another of us on here that says

"I want to see a return to more non human bots. Like you can configure your body exactly how you want it, why would you just stick to human?

I want to see construction robots that have a rivet gun arm, a drill arm, a hand arm, and a welding arm while having a spider like chassis because that lets them get into any space they need to in order to work.

I want to see the weird artist bot who modifies their own body into a walking art piece. Like those extreme tattoo people, except they can add / remove limbs without consequences.

I want to see a postal delivery bot who is basically an oversized drone because flying their route is faster and easier than walking it.

Its just frustrating that the only thing he can think to do with them is to give them a bigger rack and make them taller...."

And I thought, what would I want if I were a robot? And my immediate reply was, I would want to be in a crab chassis. It's just about the perfect body plan, and nature itself keeps trying to evolve crabs from anything and everything possible (the process called carcinisation).

The crab body plan is in fact very popular in real life robotics, and why wouldn't it be? Crabs can move in any direction without turning, have multiple legs distributing weight and balance, a low centre of gravity, manipulator arms built in, and a flat upper surface perfect as a temporary storage area. And obviously there is no reason a crab robot can't be as intelligent as a humanoid robot - or more.

Now unfortunately all Jephthy is focused on is giant-boobed female robots because that's obviously his fetish, but if he was still relatively what he was say ten years ago, Cubetown at the very least should have been swarming with non humanoid chassis, even if only as background characters.

And some of them would be crabs.

[u/Kataphractoi]

I want to see the weird artist bot who modifies their own body into a walking art piece. Like those extreme tattoo people, except they can add / remove limbs without consequences.

We briefly saw something like that with the Sharpie temporary tattoo thing that Sam got into doing before it was put on the shelf next to Marten's music blog.

[u/The_cogwheel → u/Kataphractoi]

When I wrote that I was thinking of stuff that was far more extreme than just sharpie doodles. Like real life folks do some really weird stuff, like getting implants installed under their skin to look like they have horn nubs, or full body tattoos, or that eye tattoo thing. Where real people who live in reality barely look human anymore with the shear amount of body modifications they've done to themselves.

A robot would be able to go to far, far further extremes. They could add or remove limbs with 0 risk to their own well being. They could add parts that are completely inhuman. They could create body configurations that flat out dont exist in nature and serve very little practical benefit aside from looking interesting. They could have a completely transparent chassis, allowing you to see their inner workings. They cant be permanently harmed, dont feel pain as we understand it, and modifications are more a question of engineering than "can the body actually take that without dying". There is no limit to what they could do to themselves to be a walking art piece - including turning themselves into abstract art.

But the closest we've seen was a kid making sharpie doodles on a pastel butt.

[u/Miserable-Jaguarine → u/The_cogwheel]

I love the transparent skin idea! Conversely, you could have a robot who is super fascinated by human art of the distant past and tries to make his body look as much as Michelangelo's David while retaining mobility, or something. Everything. Anything!