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Robot Snake Can Climb Trees

Posted by Soulskill on from the as-long-as-they-aren't-on-planes dept.

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."

3 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. I see nothing snake-like here.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

  2. Re:Fucking Flash again by pavon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Four posts in. by AnalogBrain · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.