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NASA Snake-Bots
faqBastard writes: "NASA's been working on some pretty cool snake-bots for exploring outer space. All kinds of neat features and capabilities ... " Robotic snakes certainly seem to be slithering into our future. OK, they look practical and intriguing -- but they give me the willies.
Ever heard of the Mars balloon?
It was a big helium balloon which was supposed to move around Mars during daytime (with the help of winds) and during the nighttime it would go lower and stop.
The snake-relation here is the device attached to the balloon. It was a snake look-a-like, formed of interconnected metal cones containing electronics and measurement gadgets inside. When they tested the balloon, they set it free in France and it ended up in the USA, to be picked up by a farmer when the balloon ended stuck on a tree.
The snake was designed to be such that it wouldn't get stuck between rocks. In fact, the snake performed exceptionally well, slithering between rocks.
What happened to the Mars balloon and the snake?
Well, it didn't make it (the balloons were removed from the project), due to many reasons, one of them being the breakdown of Soviet Union and one being the failures of Mars probes. For instance, the Mars Observer carried the "Mars Balloon Relay" (MBR) and as we know, the MO disappeared 3 days before arriving on Mars. So no relays were deployed.
More information about the balloon, and here about "aerobots".
I couldn't find a link about the snake attached to the balloon, sorry.
however, about making it cheaper, a lot of what is expensive is custom (and very complex) circuitboards, processors that are very hard to find, and stuff like that. very sweet hardware -- but it's not going to be cost effective right now, or at least until it's a little more developed.
then again, Mark hasn't told me what I'm doing this summer (and I've been too occupied with finals to ask)
Lea
If you read through to the end of the article, they mentioned that the eventual hope is to replace the current system with something that uses a sort of electrical muscle substance. Some sort of thin, metal coated plastic that would deform in response to small electrical currents being placed through it, in much the same way as animal muscle works. Additional bonus over something that responds to PH is that your mechanical snake doesn't have a seizure if it wanders into some sort of natural acid/base deposit/
do robotic snakes eat computer mice?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
No, this was not on Slashdot a year ago. Did you read the article on space.com?
There was a previous article on snakebots but this article is new and goes into a lot more detail on proposed uses for the snakebots and the benefits of them.
Think of it as an update, continuuity is good, slashdot should followup on interesting articles, like remember when we mentioned cool widget foobar? Well this is where it is now.
This general idea has been around for years; Gavin Miller has been doing snake robots and snake animations since the 1980s. (Miller's a great guy, but he has this thing for snake locomotion.) Snakelike robot tentacles have been built and used, with modest success, as spray-painting robots.
There's probably a cool toy in this. The technology needs to be redesigned by somebody like the guy who did the Furby to get the cost down, though.
Don't these people ever match movies? You create some sort of icky technological horrors like robotic snakes and deploy them in an isolated location like a space station or martian colony and they will certainly go berserk, killing all but the most charismatic male and his love interest. These two characters of course defeat the evil technology just in time to catch the last spaceship back to earth.
there are also a lot of related projects, such as Proteo and Digital Clay that are also very interesting stuff.
disclaimer: I currently work on this project at PARC (well, when I'm not in school), and I used to work for that group at NASA (for a summer).
Lea