Watch a Snake Robot swim

When they are sea snakes swimming, they make their way through the water by shaking their green tails, which is very elegant but requires a lot of coordination. So when the robotics at Carnegie Mellon University decided it was their time earth robot snake to take it to the water, they took a shortcut. They approached the incredibly complex snake biomechanics and then loaded them with machine propellers.

The result is a provocative, headless torpedo: a modular underwater robot with a hardened snake. As you can see in the video below, he manages an impressive swim by combining a stern booster to control the stability of movement to move forward with his side thrusters along his body, he also uses some bending joints (actuators, in speech) to position the side thrusters. “It’s not so biologically inspired at the moment, but it’s still a pretty good robot,” says CMU robotic Howie Choset, who developed the machine code. “We’re doing something in the middle. We are trying to imitate the movement as best we can, perhaps on a macroscopic level, with conventional motors and actuation. ”

That’s the beauty of robotics: engineers don’t have to follow the rules of natural selection. Choset and his colleagues want a robot that the U.S. Navy can use to inspect ships and submarines, which can slide into tight spaces, like ballast tanks. But it is certain that the Army does not need a snake robot, that is, to bite it. “When biology is evolving, it’s evolving system“Says Choset.” He’s not developing a single ability. So the snake can slide on the ground in special ways, but the snake also poops, eats, and even reproduces. It has all these other things to keep the snake alive, but it certainly has no benefits for the locomotive. in any way “.

Think about how a bird compares to an airplane, as it is biologically inspired because it creates a lift with its wings, but these wings are fixed and paired with jet engines. And some of the extras that nature has given to birds are missing. “Airplanes fly long distances, but the wings have no wings and no feathers,” says Choset.

Choset’s team can approach snake design basically compared to evolution. The ground-based version of the robot uses actuators that move in concert to propel the machine forward, which is similar to what a real snake does. But in the water, the robot doesn’t have to push hard surfaces – the ground version is thrown into a pool and sinks like a very expensive stone. So instead of reproducing the hypnotic wind movements of the sea snake — the intricate coordination between muscle and bone — the researchers chose stimuli that propel and direct the robot.

At the moment, the robot’s swimming is not particularly sophisticated, although an operator can control the machine through underwater hoops to find his way using the camera on the snake’s “face”. But the team’s idea is to refine the algorithms that control its movement using machine learning: by building a digital version of the robot in simulation, an AI can try many, many random ways to swim, eventually landing the most efficient type of locomotion. through trial and error. Then, Choset’s team would take that knowledge to the real-world robot, giving them the maneuvers they really needed to tease in tight spaces. Other robotics are working with other machines that mimic animal locomotion, such as teaching a dog-shaped four-legged robot how to walk or adjust different types of surfaces.