Slashdot Mirror
Scandinavian Scientists Designing Robotic Snakes
Cowards Anonymous writes "The Sintef Group, a research company based in Trondheim, Norway, announced that it's designing a robot based on snakes. The 1.5-meter long robots, which are made of aluminum, are being designed to inspect and clean complicated industrial pipe systems that are typically narrow and inaccessible to humans. The intelligent robots have multiple joints to enable them to twist vertically and climb up through pipe systems to locate leaks in water systems, inspect oil and gas pipelines and clean ventilation systems."
More than you ever wanted to know about devices that inspect/clean, etc. the internals of pipes. These snakes sound like a logical next step. Boring to you, fascinating to me.
The summery looks awfully similar to things CMU has already done - see hack a day
4Z5TX
Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute built "robots based on snakes" quite a while back. In fact the project description page was last updated in November 2006. You can find more info about the project at, funnily enough, SnakeRobot.com with videos.
This is not new, actuaclly...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/22/1849235
That's actually a misconception however. Denmark is incorrectly labelled as part of Scandinavia, even by supposedly reputable sources. Scandinavia is the peninsula named after the mountain range on it, the Scandic mountains. Ever since Sweden kicked Denmark out of their holdings on the peninsula(Including parts of what is now Sweden, and all of Norway), they haven't been part of Scandinavia.
However, it carries a lot of political inertia, especially when people equate the Nordic Countries(Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland) with Scandinavia.