How about we put that in an innovative light? Today we Ever Widening Circles brings you the
story of robots with the advantages of a snake.
Now here’s an idea that is truly “outside the box!” This innovation, which uses nature for inspiration, is just one incredible example of biomimicry; a growing field of science at the intersection of engineering, design, and biology.
First, a quick look at where we are going today…
Via:cmurobotics 1
After we get over the impulse to recoil from how snake-like it is, you will see that the snake robot has some incredible abilities and applications, about which we will soon learn more. But first, let’s take a look at the possibilities for underwater applications:
Via: Michele Guarnieri 2
What is the potential for the snake robot?
Consider the many dirty jobs that, performed by humans, endanger lives, or jobs that require access to small spaces, spaces that even conventional robots, with limbs or wheels, could never access. Consider the possibility for assisting in minimally-invasive surgery, for inspection of power plants, for aiding in search and rescue efforts, in archaeological digs.
When one considers the many fields of work and disciplines of study in which we humans are engaged, and the number of associated problems we are trying to solve, it becomes clear that the snake robot has a lot of potential indeed!
We found a short video from a conference that explores the reaches of the snake robot’s potential. Let’s take a little trip into the future of this extraordinary technology, with a video courtesy of the Huffington Post:
Via: Engadget 3
If you’d like to read more about the snake robot story, here’s a link to a darn good article by Fox News called Snake Robots: Slithering machines could aid search and rescue efforts.
Snake robots aren’t just interesting creepy crawlies, they offer us a chance to explore our world and enhance our experience.
Why should we care?
Most importantly, inventions like the snake robot remind us to look to nature in our search for solutions to our many problems.
Think about it for a moment: humans have been perking along, solving problems with clever inventions since the dawn of simple machines like the wheel. That’s about 5,500 years. But Mother Nature has been barreling along, solving every challenge an organism can face on this earth for 3.5 billion years!
That’s a lot of “research and development” and “institutional knowledge” that we can tap into!
And that’s essentially what the new field of science I mentioned – called “Biomimicry”, or in professional circles, “Biomimetics” – is doing to make the world a better place.
If you’d like to check out a few other great articles we’ve done on that remarkable innovation of the future, I can recommend a great article we wrote called Biomimicry and the Floating Islands. Or another that gets shared a lot is called, Turning Birds into Dinosaurs.
-Liesl
“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”-Victor Borge
Liesl can be found on Instagram @Liesl.UV
https://everwideningcircles.com/2015/12/11/snake-robots-can-you-watch-this-without-squirming/
