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:I see nothing snake-like here..

[timeOday]

This is neat, but I don't see anything to do with snakes here.. Which is a shame.

I agree the writeup over-states the degree to which this robot is biomimetic, but why is that a bad thing? Evolution never even "discovered" the wheel.

Re:I see nothing snake-like here..

[SunSpot505]

Nature is a fantastic designer. Sure, she works slowly, but every project is subjected to years of testing and refinement. It’s no wonder then that we see engineers looking to nature for inspiration in robotics.

After reading this quote I was thinking the same thing, and also wondering what snake they looked at... Did it have a broken spine?

I have a 80" arboreal python and it moves nothing like that on the ground or climbing a vertical post. Snakes don't twist on the ground, and most (arboreal) snakes don't wrap around trees like that either, as it is an extremely inefficient method of motion for moving. Watching how a real arboreal snake climbs a tree would have yielded a much better climber of a robot. In my experience snakes use large bends in their bodies as hands or feet that they use to grip the sides of the object. They can release the bends muscle tension and moves up the post, squeezing again, and repeating the process downwards. It looks like an inchworm, but with the inching movement perpendicular to the direction of movement and opposed to congruent. That I would like to see on a robot, and it seems like it would also fit well with the attempts at modular design they are working with.

I understand some of the excitement about this thing, but as a snake owner I am not even close to impressed, even if it had frickin' laser eyes. This thing looks a worm after a rain, not the delicate beauty and raw strength of a snake. Whatever happened to all that hydraulic muscular research I read about years ago? This would have been the ideal application rather than a bunch of universal joints...

awwwwww come on....

[Thud457]

Dare to envision a brighter apocalypse for once in your life!

If I see that shit on zazzle.com, I better get my cut!

For an encore

[Mathness]

For an encore the robot snake grabbed an apple and headed for a tree next to a robot female.

Re:Fucking Flash again

[pavon]

Because the person who posted the video on youtube (apparently an official CMU account) opted to show ads over the top of it. Youtube's HTML5 player doesn't have that feature right now (I imagine it could be done with a transparent div and javascript), so they fell back to Flash. Why CMU thinks they should be showing advertisements on what is already an advertisement for their school is beyond me.

Re:Four posts in.

[AnalogBrain]

Robotic snake Overlords? Modular snakes on a plane? "It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically" - Yeah, but not as well as your mom? See? Still ripe for comments.

Now All We Need

[MrTripps]

Now we need a robot Samuel L. Jackson to complain about them being on a MFing plane.

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.

Re:Fucking Flash again

[bhartman34]

Or do you just enjoy having less people be able to view your content?

Probably, it's a reluctance to learn a (relatively) new technology to satisfy the needs of 1% of a market, when the other 99% (those not using iPods, iPads, or mobile phones) can see the video just fine. When the market changes, and most people are viewing the sites on mobile devices, it'll make sense to change. Until then, why bother? It's not like people who have these other mobile devices don't have desktops or laptops.

Power...

[Sooner Boomer]

...it's all about power. Until a small, very power-dense storage medium is developed (better than current technology), this (and powered prosthetics) will remain only a curiosity. Once you can power it autonomously, there are no limits to the things this device (and those that follow) can do. But this is no easy feat! Perhaps beamed power would work. Or make one that can eat and digest rats and birds!

can it sell apples?

[swschrad]

nfm