Written on June 7, 2008 – 3:00 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Insects represent the most diverse group of animals on the Earth. Man has studied these animals for quite a few centuries now, discovering that many insects are astoundingly intelligent. Although I don’t think man will apply the hierarchic principles of insects to the human society, he can easily use their anatomical structures to improve some existing vehicles. Take spiders and turn them into lumberjacks.

The Plustech Oy / John Deere hexapod logging machine prototype has six strong legs, it features no devastatingly huge wheels or tracks to make a logging machine that does less damage to the forest and can move through more challenging terrain than wheeled or tracked logging machines.
If the terrain is rough, the ground pressure can be adjusted by changing the machine’s six shoes. Plustech also informs us that when the machine confronts obstacles (as well as tiny animals), it can simply be stepped over in order to preserve as much of the forest as possible, taking only what loggers are after and not more than that. Here’s a demo clip:



The prototype seems OK and the guys from Plustech Oy really did a nice job as to come up with a “greener” vehicle that does less damage to forests. Still, we don’t know if the vehicle runs on electricity, hybrid engines or just the usual polluting engine. Moreover, they don’t say anything about how fast can it travel. From what I see the spider lumberjack moves pretty slow.