If you ever find yourself stuck in a disaster zone, your rescuer could take on some unexpected forms, like a drone or a cyborg cockroach – and now we can add a soft robotic snake to the mix. A Stanford team has developed a flexible robot that grows like a vine, squeezing through rubble to find trapped survivors and even delivering water to them. Rather than a rigid robot rummaging through the rubble, the Stanford snake starts life as a rolled-up, inside-out tube made of soft material, with a pump at one end and a camera attached to the other. When it’s fired up, the robot inflates and grows in the direction of the camera end, while the other end stays put. It’s a mobility method closer to that of plants than animals (or robots, for that matter), and the team wanted to explore how this technique could be used.
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