Miscellaneous

Charlie Romer interned at Artisan's Asylum for two weeks, and produced these dueling robot snakes by the end of his time with us. The snakes play a game that is a mix of Snake, Millipede, and Tron Light Bikes; the two snakes start off facing each other, and have to avoid each other while not crashing into walls of their enclosure. The first snake that crashes into the other or an obstacle loses!

The snakes are still being developed; keep an eye out for these dueling robots in future festivals. After a little bit more work, they'll have their speed controlled by Arduino, bump sensors in their nose, and will link up to a scoreboard displaying which snake is winning.

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The study centered on the frictional anisotropy—or resistance to sliding in certain directions—of a snake's belly scales. While previous investigators had suggested that the frictional anisotropy of these scales might play a role in locomotion over flat surfaces, the details of this process had not been understood.

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"Ladder Climbing with a Snake Robot" by Tatsuya Takemori, Motoyasu Tanaka, and Fumitoshi Matsuno from Kyoto University and University of Electro-Communications, Japan. Presented at IROS 2018 in Spain.

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(Video runs at 4X the actual speed) A demonstration of GE's bio-inspired giant earthworm-like tunneling robot. The robot is shown digging through dirt in a test apparatus set up in the Robotics Lab at GE Research in Niskayuna, NY.

Mimicking the rhythmic movements of earthworms moving through soil and force of tree roots growing into the ground, this bio-inspired soft robot design developed by GE researchers could enable faster, more efficient ways to dig underground tunnels.

The development of this tunneling robot is part of a 15- month, $2.5 MM project through DARPA’s Underminer program to develop faster, more efficient ways to dig tunnels in support of critical military operations. The new capabilities under development could enable a multitude of robotic applications, ranging from non-destructive inspection and repair of industrial infrastructure pipe inspection to supporting wireless infrastructure construction.

Acknowledgement: This material is based upon work supported by DARPA TTO under award Acquisition Services Directorate (AQD) number D19AC00018.

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In this work we show how bio-inspired, 3D-printed snakeskins enhances the friction anisotropy and thus the slithering locomotion of a snake robot. Experiments have been conducted with a soft pneumatic snake robot in various indoor and outdoor settings. This work has been published in the journal Soft Robotics (see link: http://doi.org/10.1089/soro.2022.0051)

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