Tachikoma (Japanese: タチコマ) are fictional walker robots endowed with artificial intelligence (AI) that are featured in the Ghost in the Shell universe.

[2] Production I.G was unable to use the Fuchikoma design in the 2002 Stand Alone Complex anime television series due to copyright conflicts.

Tachikoma are controlled by individual AIs, are capable of speech and generally exhibit a childish, curious, joyful and active personality, although they are consummate professionals in the field.

Each wheel appears to be angled and omnidirectional, allowing the Tachikomas to move in any direction with their drive system, which can control all degrees of freedom in its task space.

Other abilities of the Tachikoma include jumping great distances, sticking to vertical or inverted surfaces, engaging a thermoptic camouflage mechanism, and grappling/rappelling using their adhesive string launchers.

Standard Tachikoma equipment includes a 7.62×51mm light machine gun mounted in the right arm, a secondary weapon hardpoint in the "snout" (a 50 mm grenade launcher, capable of launching both explosive and gas grenades which can be replaced by a six-barrelled 12.7×99mm Gatling gun),[5] a universal cybernetic connector on an extensible, prehensile cable in the left arm, liquid wires that can be used for grappling, rappelling or for restraining purposes and a built-in thermoptic camouflage system.

[7] As seen several times in the anime, they are lightly armored, resisting small-caliber firearms, though heavier automatic weapons or explosives can easily wreck them.

Though they possess individual artificial intelligence, every night they are synchronized, so they start the next day with identical consciousnesses that are each the sum of their total collective experience and development.

In the episode "Afternoon of the Machines – PAT," Asuda tries unsuccessfully to defect from Japan, because as a state-funded scientist, he is not allowed to hold patents on his inventions.

In episode 12 of the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, one slightly malfunctioning Tachikoma goes on a joy-ride through the city, where it meets a young girl named Miki who is looking for a lost dog.

In the manga, she expresses concern over the evolution of the Tachikomas' AI and orders it monitored to catch any undesired emotional developments or an unwanted "rise of the robots."

By the end of the series, the Tachikoma fleet start approaching sapience; all are sent back to the lab for dissection, amidst fears that they are no longer fit for combat duty.

It is the use of natural oil in Batou's personal Tachikoma (all other units used synthetic lubricant) that acted as a catalyst for the behavioral anomalies that began to manifest as sapience.

Major Kusanagi subsequently bans the use of natural oil prior to the later decision to halt deployment of Tachikomas in field ops.

The silver Tachikoma is destroyed on sight after it rescues Batou from attack by an Armed Suit, a bipedal power-actuated armored exoskeleton.

The blue and yellow Tachikoma combine their efforts to save him, and conduct a desperate and ultimately suicidal attack against the Umibozu, while Batou watches from a nearby terrace with a stricken look on his face.

Those sent to the lab for structural analysis were restored from backups, their AI given a slew of upgrades and loaded into a new fleet, which appears in the second season.