If you need any convincing about the utility of using biology as inspiration in robotic engineering, check out this amazing video of a robotic snake (and the real snake motion studies on which it was based). Dubbed the ACM-R5, and being developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, it sports a sophisticated attitude/torque sensing system, a camera with lighting in its head, and a 32-bit microcontroller. It runs on a Lithium-Ion battery and gets up to 30-minutes of slither and swim on a charge. It was developed as a rescue robot, able to find victims among debris in an earthquake or other disaster situation. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be kinda freaked out if I saw this mechanical sea monster swimming or slithering amongst the rubble. [Gareth Branwyn]
The swimming robot is pretty cool, but some folks at CMU have developed a snake robot which can not only swim, but it can also crawl through pipes and climb straight up vertical crevices:
http://voronoi.sbp.ri.cmu.edu/projects/modsnake/modsnake.html
Thanks for the comments, Neil.
Yeah, I should have pointed out that robosnakes are nothin’ new and that there are even some aleady in the field (like the pipe crawlers).
Stanford’s Professor Ossama Khatib was at NUS(National University of Singapore) last week, and showed some clips of the most wonderful robots he had seen. This snake was by far the most amazing!