Happy Halloween

Did you know that spiders can fly and travel a long distance by suspending its electrostatically charged silk in the air and using it as a sail? Sometimes when you walk down the street you suddenly get a spider web tangled on your face seemingly out of nowhere and this makes you wonder, “where did this come from, did I just run into a spider web unknowingly?... but there are no structures nearby where spiders can build their net on?”. Chances are it was one of these bad ass traveling spiders you caught.

They are nature's amazing engineers. They are the masters of building complex two dimensional topological structures. They have figured out how to synthesize a novel material that has a tensile strength that is more than ten times stronger than our comparable invention, nylon. Some spiders like Anelosimus eximius even managed to develop pro-social behaviors to increase their collective luck in the wilderness as a species, something that is often hard pressed to find in the behavior of human engineers in the wilderness.

Dusty would have not been possible without our amazing team. Each one of us brings in highly specialized expertise in their fields that really doesn’t really overlap at this size of our team. But as a team we emerge as a powerful collaborative entity that offers our collective expertise to design, build, and operate our field printers for the first time in the industry. The work can become exhaustive from time to time, everyone is really trying hard to make our product happen. The rewards of looking at our robots working, however, make all this effort worthwhile and this is why we do what we do. We make things happen.

To celebrate this Halloween, we have built a giant pumpkin spider skin for our robots. It is about 62”x62”x12” tall and it is totally driveable! It really is fun to drive this spider -- and not field printer -- around the office. I guess it’s time for Maratus volans (peacock spiders) to seriously reconsider their outfit and life choices. Happy Halloween!