This Guy Turned a Humanoid Robot Into a Halloween Terminator

In the 1980s, the popular anxiety about artificial intelligence was that it would send killer robots after humans, as depicted in James Cameron’s iconic documentary The Terminator. Today, we know that the real danger is AI stealing our creative jobs, but a hulking robot in the shape of an Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly looks more intimidating. And now that humanoid robots are starting to become more accessible, Dave Niewinski of Dave's Armoury build a walking Terminator for Halloween.

Building a real, walking humanoid robot from scratch would be an insane amount of work — far too much to justify for a holiday prop. Fortunately, Niewinski was able to get his lucky mitts on a serious piece of hardware: a Unitree H1. That is an extremely sophisticated humanoid robot that is roughly the same size as a person. It weighs in at 47kg (about 104lbs) and is 180cm (about 5’11”) tall, which isn’t that far off from Arnie’s height. It has fully actuated joints and a whole host of sensors that let it walk around. We aren’t sure how much it costs, as it seems like a kind of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” type of situation.

Niewinski's plan to turn the Unitree H1 into a Terminator wasn’t that different than a cosplayer making a costume. Out of the box, the H1 looks like a robot — just not the same kind of robot as a T-800. So, Niewinski needed to dress it up to give it the appearance of a T-800 endoskeleton, sans skin. He chose to do that using mostly decorative 3D-printed parts that attach onto the H1.

The existing CAD models of the H1 that Niewinski was given weren’t quite accurate, so he 3D-scanned the real H1 using the Polycam app. That performs photogrammetry using many photos taken from different angles to produce a 3D model. With that, Niewinski was able to design 3D models in Blender that fit onto the H1’s structure. With some help, he then 3D-printed all of the parts and mounted them onto the H1’s frame.

The transformation was really impressive and it now looks a lot like a Terminator. The final step to sell the illusion was the addition of glowing eyes. Niewinski put RGB LEDs in the 3D-printed eye sockets and set them to red.

It looks pretty darn convincing and it would be scary to see this thing walking around your neighborhood while trick-or-treating.