Watching Star Wars as a seven-year-old inspired Matt from the UK to create a two-tonne robot that has walked into the record books.
Matt Denton, from Hampshire (UK) has now built the largest rideable hexapod robot, which measures 2.8 m x 5 m (9 ft 2 in x 16 ft 4 in).
What's a hexapod? A hexapod is something with six legs
The hexapod robot, called Mantis, can be driven from inside or operated by Wi-Fi. It's 1.9 tonnes (4,188 lb) of bulk can walk at a top speed of just over 1 km/hr (0.6 mph).
Matt started building the hexapod robot in 2009, after he had built more than 20 smaller hexapod machines. Most were fewer than 50 cm (1 ft 7.6 in) in diameter.
One of his hexapods even features in a Harry Potter film as a six-legged tortoise!
Matt’s inspiration for building walking machines came after he went to the cinema to see Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (USA, 1980) when he was seven.
He was amazed by the four-legged AT-AT robots.
"I walked out of the cinema going 'machines that walk’. I couldn't believe it. That was pretty much it, that inspired me!"
Matt’s dreams then came full circle after he was chosen to work on Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, on the BB8 robot.
Throughout his childhood Matt had a love of creating and building machines.
"When I got to the age of 13, I was always taking them apart and rebuilding the and making Frankenstein toys out of two things, trying to make them faster or better or bigger!"
Matt also credits LEGO® for for making him curious as a child: "LEGO Technic sets fired up my imagination as a child. I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now without them."
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