Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, this is some freaky sci-fi robot nonsense going on here.

Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab has a whole program entirely dedicated to creating robot snakes. These freaky reptilian go-bots can slither along floors, climb trees, swim (!), move along vertical pipes, and even sit up like a cobra.

Robot engineers often taken cues from nature, which has several million years on modern robotics to develop and tweak its designs. And nature’s done an admirable job with snakes: the original fall of man, that whole dust-up with Rikki Rikki Tavi, going on that plane with Samuel L. Jackson. Good stuff. But, given some development, I think man will one-up evolution on the snake front. According to the website for the Robot Snake School, the slithery Wall-Es can be used for a variety of practical means such as search and rescue operations, surgical procedures, bomb disarming, and bridge inspection. Basically all the things that lazy real snakes refuse to do.

Videos of why you should never sleep again after the jump.

via singularityhub