The development of animal-inspired machines continues with the creation of a robot designed to learn the sidewinder slither of a snake.
This robot, called the Modsnake, is being worked on by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology (GT), Oregon State University and Zoo Atlanta, according to CNET.
While Modsnake's previous version had a sidewinding gate inspired by real snakes, it moved the snake sideways with a horizontal and vertical sine wave, which is not the same as a real snake's gait.
GT's Daniel Goldman, one of the authors of the study, said the research team was looking to study the experiences that a snake goes through and use the robot, dubbed "Elizabeth," as a physical model, NBC News reported.
"By studying the animal and the physical model simultaneously, we learned important general principles that allowed us to not only understand the animal, but also to improve the robot," Goldman said.
The robot's gait would have it digging into sand, which is nothing like how an actual snake would sidewind, CNET reported. A real snake stretches its body out and stays low so it has more contact with the ground. It moves itself forward with a series of up and down wave movements, only moving parts of its body that are not touching the ground.
Hamid Marvi, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon, said the team found out that the sindwinder snakes used two orthogonal waves that they can control independently in order to move through sand.
"We used the snake robot to systematically study the failure modes in sidewinding," Marvi said. "We learned there are three different failure regimes, which we can avoid by carefully adjusting the aspect ratio of the two waves, thus controlling the area of the body in contact with the sand."
Elizabeth used these changes to wind up a sand dune, an ability that some real snakes don't possess, NBC News reported.
The team's research was published in the journal Science.
