14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen plenty of robots in our time, from multi-legged walkers to worms, of all things, but we still have a long way to go before any of them can walk or otherwise move around efficiently. There's a reason we still do most of the transportation by means of wheeled vehicles after all.
Scientists and engineers never seem to be slacking off though. In fact, a new robot design usually comes out every week or so.
Here is the one that we have for you today: the slitherer. It's not an official name, but we think it fits because of how the robot goes about, moving from point A to point B.
Snakes have been under study for many years now, by people from both military and educational institutions. Many people in fact.
The snake-like robot from Carnegie Mellon University
Seeing as how snakes have been used as an inspiration for so many things over the decades, and how many researchers have been looking at them, a breakthrough was bound to happen sooner or later.
The folks at CMU have been working on a robotic snake for years, but only recently did they finally crack the tough nut of locomotion.
They ended up studying and adapting the way a sidewinder moves. The sidewinder is a venomous pit-viper species found in the southwestern United States.
They wanted to understand why the snake is capable of scaling sand dunes. Once they figured it out, they were able to program a robot with the ability to do the same thing. The secret ultimately lied in how the body moved in wavy, side-to-side repeated arcs.
According to Carnegie Mellon roboticist Hamid Marvi, their robotic snake can climb inclines of up to 20 degrees on loose sand. It might not seem like much, but the previous prototypes couldn't even handle 10 degrees, so it's actually a pretty big deal.
The applications for the still unnamed robot snake
Search-and-rescue missions are one thing, since a snake could, say, slip through the cracks in debris and carry the ends of breather masks and tubes to people caught underneath. We're making abstraction of the obvious potential for scouting here.
Speaking of which, military applications are a surety as well, since the robotic snake can travel through rough terrain and (at least eventually) even climb trees and hide among the leaves.
In addition to Carnegie Mellon University, other researchers on the team of scientists who worked on the snake came from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, and Zoo Atlanta.
