snakebots

At Carnegie Mellon, those masters-of-the-robo-universe have a dedicated lab for studying snake locomotion and applying it to robots that can swim, climb telephone poles and wriggle up walls.

The Israel Defense Forces are preparing to deploy a camouflage-wearing, camera-toting robot snake. The spybot, which slithers through cracks and caves using principles of motion derived from those of actual snakes, is just one of roboticist Amir Shapiro's clever designs based on animal physiology. We visited Dr. Shapiro's lab at Ben Gurion University of the Negev to get a closer look.