I was thinking last night and I had a thought (a rare occurennce 
) wouldn’t it be cool if you could use 3dof legs and a custom chassis to make an octopod, any benefits to this v hexapod and any cons besides the added weight/ cost? thanx for listening to the ramble.
an 8 legged hexapod? 
hmmm ur right hydro, that does sound cool
well, this is just a thought i thought i would through out there, but wouldn’t it be the same weight to power ratio as a 4 or 6 legged hexapod?(thats if all the same servos were used and they were very close to the same weight), i dont know 
well i would know that a benefit would be an enlarged deck area
some cons i think would be that the body would flex, especially if ur making an off road octopod, also…o no, i lost my train of thought 
, curse adhd, uhhh…o yea, power consumption, youd need a much larger amount of juice if it were to run for very long and im not totally sure but wouldn’t the gaits be a bit harder to program?
Well, if you look on the site, you’ll see a Polypod link.
Or… at least I remember one…
Anyhow, I’ve seen a couple “centipedes” (they actually only had about 20 legs, which is still very impressive).
They do seem to work well enough…
I guess that besides cost and weight the only other real problem is coordination of errors.
Imagine having to position and adjust that many servos!
At least it has the same amount of legs as a real spider 
try a circular platform, reinforced. ideas come from arachnobot.
I have done quite a bit of thinking and some design work for octapod configurations. Have a look at my Walk 'N Roll thread in Projects. I just noticed some of the image links don’t work, but I moved some stuff around on my website so you can look there also.
There would be 24 servos just to control eight 3DOF legs. An inline configuration would be capable of walking as a hexapod using just six legs, or as a full octapod on all eight legs. Heck, you could probably also have it walk as a quadrapod using just the end pairs of legs. There are a lot of options when adding an extra pair of legs.
In any case, an SES Octapod (similar to Walk 'N Roll) will be large and quite heavy with the added pair of legs. Power could be a problem also, but I have planned to use two 6V 1600mAH battery packs for the legs and SSC-32 (each side powered by a separate battery).
8-Dale