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Robot Snake Could Aid Search and Rescue Operations
mikejuk writes "The Carnegie Mellon University Biorobotics Lab demonstrates how the snakelike robots can aid search and rescue operations in collapsed buildings. The video appeared more or less at the same time as the current real disaster in Dhaka, Bangladesh where an 8-storey building collapsed, trapping some three thousand people. Bangladesh rescue teams, helped by members of the community, have so far worked with small tools and their bare hands to bring out survivors. Having a snake robot that could provide pictures from within the building would lead to speedier and more effective rescue operations."
The money spent on the rescue bots could be used to properly construct at least ten times as many buildings.
Robot Snake Could Aid Search and Rescue Operations
Even if it was a "plane" crash?
... we're now building ROBOT SNAKES? Now we not only have to be afraid of robots and snakes, but some sort of hideous technological hybrid?
Perhaps designing better buildings would be more useful? Or perhaps they might build robot architects?
Can you fuck it?
I'm thinking tentacle porn.. We could sell a bunch of them!
After looking at the video I have to conclude that:
MODERN DIRECTION OR ROBOTS DEVELOPMENT IS COMPLETELY ENTERTAINMENT-DRIVEN, AND NOT SUITABLE FOR ANY PRACTICAL PURPOSE.
Seriously, snake shape is absolutely worthless in those conditions. It looks good (as long as you don't follow it trying to wriggle its way across trivial obstacles for hours), and probably fun to program, however why anyone with any remnants of sanity would think, this is in any way useful, is still a mystery for me.
Real snakes have an advantage of great flexibility, high energy density and low weight. This contraption has no hope to utilize either of those things. Legs, some kind of folding wheels, even air jets would provide far greater mobility with the same size, and anyone who actually has a goal of developing a useful device, would use some of those solutions already. But noooo, they have to play with snake-like shape because snakes are cool.
Really, GTFO of my engineering and go do something on a stage.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
... the demo doesn't exactly look awesome. Just a plumber's helper with a funny bot that jerks a video camera in random directions. I'm sure the technology to control the snake is pretty cool, but it looks like overkill for what it's accomplishing.
Then someone has to make sense of the rapidly spinning video images.
Quite a number of people on the Indian subcontinent die every year from cobra strikes. Snakes are an object of horror -- if you're trapped in a pile of rubble, a snake may not be the thing they want to see.
Other than that, I think it's a great idea.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I understand why you would want to emulate a snake: a smooth flexible body with no limbs to get snagged could get through tiny crevices and cross gaps that a wheeled vehicle would fall through. However, I think they are forgetting a huge psychological factor here - people fear snakes. A person is lying, pinned beneath some rubble, confused, in pain and helpless. Suddenly they see this snake crawling through the rubble, getting closer and closer. They will panic. They will try to get out, injuring themselves further. Either that, or they will try to kill the snake, potentially damaging the robot.
Besides, that robot needs to be a lot more flexible, or use the toroidal skin drive they've developed, to move better.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So instead of a dozen or so search and rescue personnel combing through debris, or helping survivors, they'll have one or two people staring at this things camera feed as it ever so slowly makes its way through a damaged building. Make them much smaller, cheap and autonomous so you can litter them throughout a site to find survivors and you might have something really useful. Until then this thing seems like a really expensive and wasteful toy.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Mom, there's a snake with a flashlight crawling through the rubble." Yup, I suppose trapped Christians would be fsked, but is there a Hindi aversion to the serpent Saitana?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Nevermind the nearly 400 dead at last count, but that's too inconvenient to type out for a Slashdot story which appears to say people were only trapped after the building collapsed in Dhaka.
I wonder what countries could afford such thing for their rescue team? If you do not have money to build a decent building, do you have money to spare for that kind of gadget?
Cue 'hamster rescue' jokes in 3... 2... 1...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's all good until those mother-fucking robot snakes get on a mother-fucking plane! A drone plane! MF'in' Robot snakes on a Drone plane! And fricking sharks with laser beams -- /{vox Samuel Jackson}
"No movie shall triumph over Snakes on a Plane. Unless I happen to feel like making a movie called More Motherfucking Snakes on More Motherfucking Planes." -- actual quote from
Samuel Jackson [and I assert and deem that those new snakes shall be robotic!!! - gia]
who buy cheap clothes from sleazy american firms with ceos makig millions, that who caused the problem
shoot a few ceos, make the kids at cmu live in India as garmetn workers for a few days, problem solved
but no, lets by total hypocrites, and ignore the fact that we caused the problem, lets pretend to do something useful and offer pie in the sky hi tech BS
makes me want to vomit
Reading the comments so far, two issues are repeatedly reinforced...or two incorrect assumptions so stupid I don't know why they are moderated to 'insightful' or 'important'.
First one - if it looks like a snake it will scare people further. This is nonsense...a robotic snake will behave like a snake - but not look like a snake (or at least it can be made to look not like a snake - with some flashing LED lights on the body.) The mouth will have some camera, rather than fangs. Plus these are small robots. A Cobra whose bite can kill you in two hours is big - more than 2 meters.
Second issue - how can a country which cannot build a building to appropriate standards buy such costly equipment? This is so idiotic an argument I do not know where to start refuting. Let me use a car analogy - imagine buying a cheap car alarm or a steering wheel lock for your cheap clunker.
Tat Tvam Asi
Why not just cut out the robot and put a radio and camera on the dog. 100x better than a robot at finding and helping people.
This Proof of Concept was mentioned in 2000.
Snakes... on a plane-wreck!
. -- S. Hirose, P. Cave, and C. Goulden, Biologically inspired robots: snake-like locomotors and manipulators, vol. 64. Oxford University Press Oxford, UK, 1993
[ link found as # 14 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-inspired_robotics ]
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboboa = Roboboas has 4 angled body sections, allowing Roboboa to coil by rotating adjacent sections. A motorized tail roller and casters on the midsection allow Roboboa to move in a straight line.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake-arm_robot
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakebot = Snake robots come in all shapes and sizes, from the three meters long, fire fighting snakebot developed by SINTEF,[1] to a medical snakebot developed at Carnegie Mellon University that is thin enough to maneuver around organs inside a human chest cavity. Though snakebots can vary greatly in size and design, there are two qualities that all snakebots share. First, their small cross section to length ratio allows them to move into, and maneuver through, tight spaces. Second, their ability to change the shape of their body allows them to perform a wide range of behaviours, such as climbing stairs or tree trunks.
And my favorite section is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics#Snaking : Several snake robots have been successfully developed. Mimicking the way real snakes move, these robots can navigate very confined spaces, meaning they may one day be used to search for people trapped in collapsed buildings.[72] The Japanese ACM-R5 snake robot[73] can even navigate both on land and in water.[74] [these references are:72 = http://www.snakerobots.com/
73 = http://www-robot.mes.titech.ac.jp/robot/snake/acm-r5/acm-r5_e.html with cool pictures of swimming snake robots
74 = Swimming snake robot (commentary in Japanese)
boy these things have been a long time coming. my brother worked non this as an engineering student in 1998. I remember seeing it when I visited his lab at Carnegie Mellon, along with the spider robot they sent into Mt. Erebus. at that time it had no means of locomotion.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
One may wonder in what language this robosnake' software is written.
"So how'd those new robot snakes work out when you poured through the rubble?"
"Excellent, Sir! We've located 4 survivors with them!"
"Nice work!! Their relatives must be ecstatic!"
"Well, actually it didn't work out that way, Sir..."
"Whaddayamean?!"
"All 4 unfortunately succumbed to heart attacks as soon as we spotted them, Sir..."
"Well, that's not good! Really not!!"
"No, Sir. We're still working on that part..."
99: Max, what's that?
Maxwell Smart: An electric snake. Very good for creating a diversion.
99: That's amazing! What does it run on?
Maxwell Smart: Tiny little feet.
Snake robots have been around a while, and not gotten much use in USAR (Urban Search and Rescue).
Lots of reasons:
1) It has to replace something else the USAR team carries: they have limited volume and mass. It has to do something better than existing stuff, and replace the existing stuff's function.
2) It has an umbilical (no doubt for power and control). Snakes are not energy efficient, and USAR gear needs to have battery life on the order of 12 hours or more (that's what a USAR shift is, 12 on/12 off, except when you are working straight through)
3) It doesn't fit well with the USAR operational approach which separates the search into two phases: detect victims; locate and rescue. Detect can be done by other technologies, so what the snake does is locate. The problem is that you probably don't know where the snake actually is. (I guess you can follow that umbilical like Ariadne's string). USAR folks now basically cut and dig their way through the rubble using conventional tools (jack hammer, saws, bold cutters, box cutter) and pass the debris back up the hole until they reach the victim, and then the victim is extracted through the hole the rescuer made. I'm not sure the snake robot could collect sufficient information about the path it follows to make the job of the rescuer easier. Can it shake stuff to see if it's going to fall down or move?
4) The environment is really rough in real disaster sites. Compare the fairly clean footage from Texas to pictures of Bangaladesh or West, TX. You have to be able to tolerate mud, water, abrasive material, etc.
5) None of the footage shows (nor on the CMU website) the control end of things. Is it an academic lab, maybe some Sun Workstations or a Lisp Machine? Can the snake be controlled only with it's dedicated controller? (more mass and volume, and batteries) or can you run an application on some commodity laptop running Windows (or iOS or Android)?
All of these things can get solved, but it's hard, and it's not fun Computer Science stuff that is attractive to a PhD candidate, who is more interested in gait analysis and design or fuzzy-logic control algorithms for segments, or self organizing systems. The work of getting it into the field is more grinding out the packaging details, making good user interfaces, figuring out how to manufacture the things, and myriad grunt work.
Or lack thereof. All of these recent robot and UAV developments are cool and potentially useful but we still keep missing the boat on the über power source. Lots of law enforcement agencies bought into the quadcopter UAV concept spending tens of thousands of dollars on them only to discover that the flight times are really short. They were expecting to be able to keep them aloft for hours. (Never mind the social issues.) The same thing applies to the snake robot. What's going to happen when the battery dies under a pile of rubble? And if you hard wire it, how is that going to limit its performance given that it has to pull an increasingly heavy cable thought non-smooth environments?
These need to be painted all one color with a nice, big Red Cross (or your country's equivalent) logo on every side of every segment. I know a few people who would have a heart attack if they saw one of these slithering toward them. People in dire circumstances are often panicked, dumb it down for them. Make the robot's appearance say, "I'm here to help" as much as possible.
So... err... when will I see a headline about these rescue robots actually... err... rescue somebody?
They seem to be building them, but none is actually used in the real world.