Researchers said this week that they conducted experiments to learn how sidewinder rattlesnakes are able to climb sandy hills, then applied the reptile's repertoire to an existing snake robot, so that it could do the same.
The study is an example of how scientists are applying knowledge of biology to improve technology.
Snake-like robots offer unique capabilities for such complicated tasks as search-and-rescue operations in collapsed structures and inspecting nuclear power plants, the researchers said.
"The snake robot can thread through tightly packed space to access locations that people and conventional machinery cannot," said robotics professor Howie Choset of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, according to a press release.
Carnegie Mellon robotics researcher Hamid Marvi worked on the study with colleagues while at Georgia Tech.
"Snakes are the champion animal for moving on a wide range of complex terrain," Marvi said. "They have different gaits and can switch between them as needed. They have a special gait, sidewinding, for successfully climbing on sandy hills."
The researchers studied the venomous sidewinder rattlesnake species Crotalus cerastes as it moved in a large enclosure at Zoo Atlanta filled with sand from the Arizona desert.
They raised the enclosure in order to create angles in the sand and used high-speed video cameras to understand how the rattlers were able to move their bodies, according to the release.
They discovered that the snakes improved their ability to climb sandy slopes by increasing the amount of their body that makes contact with the granular surface, using a unique wave motion.
The researchers then applied their observations to a snake robot created at Carnegie Mellon. The "snakebot" had been able to use one element of sidewinding motion to traverse level terrain, but it was not able to climb sandy inclines that real snakes can handle with no problem.
Once the snakebot was reprogrammed with the wave motion used by rattlesnakes it was able to climb up the sandy slopes, according to Marvi.
"Now the robot can climb on inclinations of up to 20 degrees on loose sand," Marvi said.
The snake robot had trouble in climbing even moderate sandy slopes of about 10 degrees before the study, added Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute researcher Chaohui Gong.
"Our initial idea was to use the robot as a physical model to learn what the snakes experienced," said Daniel Goldman, a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Physics, according to the release. "By studying the animal and the physical model simultaneously, we learned important general principles that allowed us to not only understand the animal, but also to improve the robot."
Their work was published in the journal Science.
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