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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.

2 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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