Animals photo
Biorobotics Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University
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Carnegie Mellon’s modular snake robot has been tested for use in both rescue operations and situations where neck-shaped objects need a good stranglin’. Now it has a new trick: slithering through collapsed buildings to find trapped people.

Here, the snake robot is going through a trial run at “Disaster City,” a rescue testing ground run by the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service. Like the last rescue video we saw, the ‘bot is deployed from the back of a rescue dog, then slithers around on its own, sending live video back to its drivers. This pancaked building seems like the ideal space for the compact, flexible machine: it maneuvers the cramped spaces expertly.

It’s still terrifying, though.