Snake-Bot

Posted 20 Apr 2002 at 08:58 UTC by Psyco

No wheels, no legs...not even fins? How does this thing get around?

N.A.S.A has developed a new kind of robot, one that can move with ease over obsticals, can dig underground and only costs a few hundred dollars. A bot that well...will slither over Mars. A snake-bot, and it has a symple design. It consists of a head and about 30 body segments, each with 2 servo motors and because it is so cheap to make there may even be a toy version on the market soon.

Link?, posted 20 Apr 2002 at 15:06 UTC by steve » (Master)

Psycho, don't forget to provide a link when you post an article so the rest of us can see what you're talking about.

I think he may have been referring to one of these robots:

NASA Ames Research Snakebot

The NASA JPL Serpentine Robot

NASA Snakebots Slither to Life (Space.com article - inclues some animations)

General information on snake and serpentine robots can be found here:
CMU Snake Robot Link Page
Dr. Gavin Miller's Snake Robots Page

simulated snakes, posted 21 Apr 2002 at 00:28 UTC by NateW » (Master)

My robot simulator project includes snakes with a couple of different 'gaits,' sidewinder and rectilinear. The math behind those gaits is kind of elegant, it's just sine waves. Hard to explain, but if you download it and open the snake file, it should be clear. There's also video of the sidewinder, if you don't want to download the whole app.

I'm not exactly sure how to use the project tag, but here goes: Juice. I guess that should link to my project page here? If not, use this link instead.

Any build will run the snake simulations, but you have to download Build 67 to generate snakes. The snake generation stuff is broken in the current build, but it should be back in a week or so. You can still make them by hand of course, it's just more tedious that way tedious. :-)

Miller's page is extremely cool, I probably wouldn't have thought of simulating snakes (much less actually trying it) if not for the videos at his site.

Juice, posted 21 Apr 2002 at 14:52 UTC by steve » (Master)

NateW, your Juice project looks like an interesting simulator that could come in handy for robot builders. Does it currently have any mechanism for implementing sensors? For example, could one build a biped robot with a walking algorithm that used a sense of "balance" - perhaps from measuring its inclination or angular velocity or something? I look forward to seeing a linux port so I can try it out - and a GNU GPL license so we can hack on it! :)

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