Hungry Hungry Robot Gobbles Up Anything You Hand It

Merriam-Webster defines a robot as “a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks (as in an industrial assembly line).” You may notice that the definition doesn’t say that the task has to be useful, or that the robot needs to be practical. Without such constraints, you can build a robot that does whatever sounds interesting to you. That’s exactly what YouTuber EunChan Park has done with his Giant Hungry Robot.

The Giant Hungry Robot only has one job: to gobble up whatever you put into its “hand.” In that way, it’s essentially an automatic trash can — just one that’s a lot more fun than anything you’d find at your local department store. Park actually built a similar, but smaller, robot in the past with an Arduino and 3D-printed parts. But for this new robot, Park wanted to avoid the use of either of those tools.

Instead, the body of the robot was made from a small plastic bucket. The bucket’s handle acts like an arm, and a container mounted to that is the hand. Whenever something is placed in the hand, the mouth (the lid) opens up and the item is tossed inside the bucket. For the brain of the robot, Park used a Robotis CM-530 controller. That works with a Robotis servo motor module and a distance sensor. The functionality was programmed in Robotis’ RoboPlus software. The finished robot is indeed very hungry, and proves that sometimes you can just build robots purely for fun.