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Stealth Bomber Engineer Creates Giant Burping Robot
It comes at you -- huge, menacing, and eyes glowing bright red ... It's a metal behemoth twice the size of a T-Rex and three times heavier. Four-thousand-pound cars are hoisted like toys and dangled higher than a five-story building before being pulled apart like rice paper, the steel groaning in agony as massive teeth descend to chomp on the remains.
A blast of fire flares out of the monster's nostrils, filling the air with the smell of burnt paint. What's left falls to the ground like the discarded remains of a peanut shell.
But this ain't no film or computer graphic effect. ROBOSAURUS is real -- the invention of Doug Malewicki, who used to work on the Stealth Bomber but thought that making a giant, transforming, part robot, part dinosaur would be more fun than working on invisible airplanes.
The monster travels the nation's highways disguised as a flat-bed trailer truck. Twenty-six hydraulic lifts quietly wait for the Robomaster to climb into the control room inside the head and turn on the 500-horsepower engine. Then it's time for the legs to kick out from the trailer and propel the 42-foot, 60,000-pound body straight toward the sky. Within a minute, the $2.5 million ROBOSAURUS has come to mechanized life and is ready to take on anything that gets in his way.
Inside ROBO's head, Robomaster Mark Hayes is strapped into a control chair and using a set of foot pedals to drive the mechanized monster as if it was a huge army tank. The Robomaster is assisted by a computer ''brain'' to make sure ROBO doesn't veer off course.
Since the view from so high up is too limited, Hayes watches a television monitor displaying a real-time side view of ROBO. This is being transmitted from a video camera placed inside a small, mobile transmitter that follows ROBO around like a faithful dog. Both of the Robomaster's hands are studded with micro-switches that translate each finger movement into an action that ROBO will take. For example, ''if I squeeze my left thumb and forefinger together, ROBO's left claw will do the same,'' says Hayes.
But while we might crush a bug between our fingers, when the Robomaster does it the result is 24,000 pounds of crushing force that can easily destroy a truck or even a small plane. Other fingers are used to rotate ROBO's body, control simulated guided missiles and laser weaponry, and open and snap close that humongous mouth lined with its all-too-real stainless steel teeth. And with a quick press of his pinky finger, the Robomaster can turn on two propane-fed hot air burners and shoot 20-foot flames out of ROBO's mouth that are so hot they can turn metal cherry-red. All the while there's a 6,000-watt sound system so that ROBOSAURUS can bellow with all his might.... or even burp after feasting on a particularly tasty car.
ROBOSAURUS appears at airshows, motorsport shows and all kinds of events through the United States (we hear that destroying ''Monster Trucks'' is one of his favorite pastimes). But it's not just things with wheels that need to watch out -- we once saw him tear the roof off a house and then set it on fire before rumbling off.
Copyright Los Angeles Times

2.5 Million Dollars for a giant robot that eats cars and burps?  I hear his latest project is a 3 million dollar machine that will devour those pesky Hanson kids.  Now THAT would be money well spent.

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