Robot Snake Can Climb Trees

kkleiner writes "The latest in a line of 'modsnakes' from Carnegie Mellon's Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways, including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, and even scale a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like and eerie about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera 'eye.' Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future."

Comments

I see nothing snake-like here..

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than not having limbs, this has little to do with a snake. This looks like a bunch of U-Joints with servo motors, its "rolling" up the tree, after "rolling" on the ground. A snake does not move this way.. No animal that I know of moves this way.

It's also obviously being controlled.. The AI to find a tree then decide to climb it (motivation?) would be really interesting.

This is neat, but I don't see anything to do with snakes here.. Which is a shame.. Many years ago for a Comp Sci project, I had to model a snake and it's movements (virtually -- it was an OpenGL assignment). It was really interesting to do, mimicking those thousands of coordinated muscles with electronics would be pretty fantastic. Of course, different snakes move differently .. a sidewinder basically walks on two virtual "feet", whereas a python crawls and climbs with hundreds of individual "feet".

Re:rolling up a tree

[amicusNYCL]

As far as I know, the only snakes that allow themselves to be on their back are either playing dead or actually dead. There's at least one species that will roll over and emit a "death odor" to fool predators, but with most snakes, even if they're almost dead, if you roll them on their back they go straight over again.