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Simulated Sand Dune Test Apparatus Reveals Sidewinder Snake Motion for Robotics

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University, and Zoo Atlanta have discovered that sidewinder snakes improve their ability to traverse sandy slopes by simply increasing the amount of their body area in contact with the granular surfaces they're climbing. At Zoo Atlanta, the researchers created a simulated sand dune test apparatus. The enclosure could be raised to create different angles in the sand, and air could be blown into the chamber from below, smoothing the sand after each snake was studied. Motion of the snakes was recorded using high-speed video cameras which helped the researchers understand how the animals were moving their bodies. The principles used by the sidewinders to gracefully climb sand dunes were also tested using a modular snake robot developed at Carnegie Mellon. Before the study, the snake robot could use one component of sidewinding motion to move across level ground, but was unable to climb the inclined sand trackway the real snakes could readily ascend. When the robot was programmed with the unique wave motion discovered in the sidewinders, it was able to climb slopes that had previously been unattainable.

Topics:
Automation Cameras Imaging Measuring Instruments Robotics Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:07 The original goal for this research was really to try to understand how these interesting snakes, venomous, sidewinding rattlesnakes, are able to achieve their incredible locomotion using a peculiar kind of locomotion, sidewinding, on a variety of granular sand terrain. We essentially constructed a facility down at Zoo Atlanta, in collaboration with Dr. Joe Mendelson, a curator at Zoo Atlanta, to create a, basically a simulated sand dune test apparatus. It's been known for centuries that sidewinder rattlesnakes have this unique ability to move across sand. Which is, if you think about walking on a beach, is a remarkably difficult thing to do. And it's been relatively well characterized, but not in a modern sense and not from the perspective of the sand. We started with animal studies. We started looking at how snakes do sidewinding on sand. Once we realized they use this control template, uh,

    00:01:10 they control the contact length, they basically increase it from zero to twenty degrees by forty-one percent. And that's how they successfully claim up the hill. We got in contact with collaborators, uh, at Carnegie Mellon University, Professor Howie Choset's group there, who had a robot called the Mod Snake and it turned out they had actually been using the sidewinding gait in their robot for many years to traverse all kind of ground, uh, but always had trouble on sandy dune inclines. Robots are expensive and a robot gets stuck in the sand, that's a problem, especially if that sand happens to be, say, on another planet. That's why we start studying sidewinding locomotion of snakes, to understand how they move on sand and try to, uh, transfer what we learned from biology to the robotics world. We're, we're really at the tip of the iceberg here because we found a really fascinating system where

    00:02:10 the snake informs what the robot can do and then we can manipulate the robot to do the things that either the snake won't do or can't do. So, we learn, in this case, biology, physics of complex materials, as well as helped our engineering collaborators, uh, develop better robots.