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NASA Snake-Bots

Posted by timothy on from the please-don't-gain-consciousness dept.

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.

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Here we go again... by rogerbo · · Score: 4

    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.

  2. Mark Yim by Animats · · Score: 4
    That's Mark Yim's work. He does good stuff. Yim is just about the only guy to come out of Stanford robotics in the 1990s who actually built a complex mechanical device that worked. Even more impressive is that he got Xerox PARC to buy into the idea. PARC hasn't done robotics much, but they do have the ability to build precision machinery in house, since they make copier and printer prototypes.

    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.

  3. Come on! by Jonathan · · Score: 5

    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.

  4. based on PARC work by chialea · · Score: 5
    this robot is actually a copy of the Polybot built at Xerox-PARC (under a DoD contract, though). there's actually a whole bunch of people under Dr. Mark Yim (though his litte page on the PARC site seems to be doing bad things right now) who work on this in the Modular Reconfigurable Robotics project. they were at the last Comdex with the (more advanced than the model NASA's using) robot that's pictured at the top of their page.

    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