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More details about Israel's robot snake
A robot snake, capable of recording video and sound on the battlefield, is the latest addition to the IDF's technological achievements. According to a Channel 2 report - click here to watch video - the spying robot, about two meters long and covered in army camouflage, mimics the movements and appearance of a real snake, slithering around through caves, tunnels, cracks and buildings, sending images and sound back to a soldier controlling the device through a laptop. The snake has a single camera on front end. Able to bend its joints so well that it can slither through very tight spaces, the new robotic device will be utilized to find people buried under rubble of collapsed buildings. Furthermore, the snake is able to arch its body straight, allowing it to see over obstacles. Researchers studied the movements of live snakes in order to create the most natural and realistic prototype. A price has yet to be set for the robotic snake, which is still in being developed; however, according to reports, the IDF plans on providing their combat units with the recording devices. Aside from recording multimedia, the robot snake can be used to carry bombs intended to wreak havoc on enemy soldiers or buildings. The Ministry of Defense, with experts from Technion, most likely based their intelligence-gathering robot on a previous project of Ben Gurion University, which in the recent past has created a whole slew of robotic animals with special abilities. The report also mentioned other robot animals, including, a cat that can climb walls by using its claws, and a 'dog-droid' that responds to human movement. The idea of serpent like robots is nothing new in the world of technology. Shigeo Hirose, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has been working on 'serpent robots' since the 1970s. Hirose's ACM-R5 robot, which had the ability to glide through water, unlike the IDF model, debuted at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan. Posted by: Delphi 2009-06-09 |
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