A Modular Snake Robot

StCredZero writes "Researchers at CMU are working on a Modular Snake Robot. A video from this site is up on YouTube. In addition to being able to traverse a wide variety of terrain, the robot can also climb poles, the inside of pipes and conduits, small grooves in walls, and probably more. It can also swim. Many robots can do one of those tasks. This one can do them all. That's quite an accomplishment. This has tremendous potential for the maintenance of fiber optic networks, pipelines, and plumbing in large buildings; and also as a spy device. (I wonder how loud it is?)"

a little weird

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

but useful. the telcos would sure like one of those. the us govt. would also see an interest

Old news

[garett_spencley]

I ordered one of these for my wife as a gift a little while ago. She gave me the weirdest "freaked out" look.

Yeah kind of like your expression right now ...

Old hat

[Lars Clausen]

The ability to climb poles (and legs) is cute, but apart from that, Xerox PARC had a modular robot in 2000 that could not only be a snake, but could reconfigure itself into a ball or a spider to go faster or to traverse difficult terrain. It was extremely nifty, but like so much else from Xerox PARC, they never capitalized much on it.

-Lars

Other YouTube videos

[honestmonkey]

If you check the video out, it looks cool. Youtube also points out other robot snake videos. It looks like the Japanese already have several types of things like this, they are wireless and apparently have on-board batteries, and seem to do most if not all of what this one does. So, is this really a big advance or just a bad copy-cat of a Japanese version?

promising

[darkob]

This is definetelly very promissing technology. I can easily imagine letting one of those (tethered, why now) devices into sewer (or even into toilet) two, three blocks away from the target.

planetary exploration?

[CarpetShark]

From the description of what it can do, it sounds like the answer to a lot of NASA's terrain negotiation problems. Anyone have an idea if this (perhaps on a larger scale) would suit them?

Re:Unfortunately

[ivanjager]

No, they are not all tethered any more. They've had an untethered one for about a year now. I could go down and ask them how long exactly if anyone's really interested.

They are pretty lound however, especially the untethered one I saw, as it needed a high speed fan on it to keep stuff cool. I don't remember exactly why they needed the fan, but I think it might have been because they didn't want huge heatsinks on the voltage regulators. The other source of noise of course is the sound of dozens of servos with cheap gearboxes. Each joint is controlled by a separate servo.

Sorry, I don't really know much about the current status, as I haven't been keeping up much after I leaving that lab. I still work at CMU, so I still see them now and then.