Sidewinder snakes survive on slippery desert sand by using their incredible ability to glide from side to side, a feat that scientists have incorporated into robotics.
A team of Georgia Tech researchers studied Crotalus cerastes, which zigzags across deserts in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported.
"Our initial idea was to use the robot as a physical model to learn what the snakes experienced," Daniel Goldman, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics, said in a statement. "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."
Goldman and his colleague studied sidewinder snakes in the Yuma Desert in Arizona that helped their research. Robots that move like snakes have long been a pursuit for researchers since they would be handy for traveling over rough terrain or searching for survivors in damaged buildings.
Publishing their findings in Science, the researchers programmed a robot to imitate the wave movement that characterizes the sidewinder snake. The innovative programming allowed the snake robot to climb an inclined sandy track that had earlier been impossible.
"Think of the motion as an elliptical cylinder enveloped by a revolving tread, similar to that of a tank," Howie Choset, a Carnegie Mellon professor of robotics, said in a statement. "As the tread circulates around the cylinder, it is constantly placing itself down in front of the direction of motion and picking itself up in the back. The snake lifts some body segments while others remain on the ground, and as the slope increases, the cross section of the cylinder flattens."
Measuring 2 inches in diameter and 37 inches long, the robot snake has 16 joints that allow it to move in a variety of ways.
"This type of robot often is described as biologically inspired, but too often the inspiration doesn't extend beyond a casual observation of the biological system," Choset said. "In this study, we got biology and robotics, mediated by physics, to work together in a way not previously seen."
See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?
