Theo Jansen invents incredible mechanical creatures, or new kinds of life, as he likes to say. He presented them at TED.
This CGI reconstruction demonstrates the principle behind these walking creatures:
Some intrepid designers at the University of Louisiana have taken the idea and created a kind of walking Segway, they’ve named it the Cajun Crawler:
The scooter was inspired by Theo Jansen’s leg mechanism. Throughout our research, we found no application where Jansen’s leg mechanism was used as a weight-bearing application or vehicle. The legs are made of standard 5052 Aluminum. The joints all contain deep-groove ball bearings.