Robot Snake That Can Climb and Swim to Help Disaster Victims

Scientists have created a robotic snake that can crawl, climb, swim and scale flights of stairs.
These versatile robots are designed for reaching humans who have had accidents in inaccessible places, like mountain areas or collapsed buildings. They could prove vital to emergency relief in areas that are affected by natural disasters, like floods, earthquakes and tornados. The robotic animal was created inside the Biorobotics Lab at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

On their website, the researchers outline their mission statement.

It says: “The Biorobotics Lab reduces complicated high-dimensional problems found in robotics to low-dimensional simpler ones for design, analysis, and planning.
Often, we look to biology for inspiration and sometimes, we return the favor by providing analysis that models biology.”