A young adult female holds a model airplane in an outdoor garden area with brick buildings, potted red flowers, and a decorative metal fence. 2:37
Esmée Kramer channel icon Esmée KramerOriginal creator 4.1M views Save

Garden hose, pipe and foam make a walking raptor

Esmee Kramer, a Dutch robotics student, spent her spare time building a raptor. It walks, and it can pick things up with its mouth. more

She did it in the gaps, between her job and her classes in network and systems engineering. The project took the better part of a year. Some of what went into it was just lying around the house.

A person holds a large pink, white and black piece next to a frame structure. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
The raptor took most of a year, built in the gaps around her job and her studies.

The body is PVC pipe, garden hose and foam. From those three plain things she built a costume with joints that bend and turn.

A person stands on the grass beside a large yellow frame with black wing-like parts, under a blue sky. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Out on the grass, the yellow frame stands under a blue sky.

The head was the hard part. She wanted it to move up and down, left and right, and to rotate, so the motion would look natural, and that meant she needed some control over the neck too. It worked. The head and neck are what people praise most.

A young adult female holds a model airplane in an outdoor garden area with brick buildings, potted red flowers, and a decorative metal fence. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Esmee Kramer, a Dutch robotics student, spent her spare time building a raptor.

The tail has two bend points, with short pieces of garden hose between the PVC parts. Inside is a fiberglass stick she found in the garage, which pulls the tail back straight. To swing it, she just moves her body.

Then she suits up. Out on the grass the raptor walks with her, and its mouth can pick things up. The head turns and dips as she goes, and the tail swings behind.

A person wearing black wing-like attachments stands on the grass beside a yellow frame. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
With the parts on, she's ready to take the raptor out for a walk.

Some of the warmest praise in the comments comes from people who build things. One mechanical engineering student joked about putting their energy in the wrong place by not making one, and someone else asked for blueprints to build their own. Jurassic Park fans got there too, with the line the raptor seems made for. Clever girl.