Snakebot inspires dreams, haunts nightmares

By at 12:52 pm Sunday, Sep 5

Built by robotics students at Carnegie Mellon, Uncle Sam the Snakebot is simultaneously horribly awesome, and awesomely creepy.

Uncle Sam is programmed with a variety of different "gaits", or types of movement patterns, which are based on the real-life behavior of real-life snakes. The goal is to create a modular—and, thus, relatively simple to produce and scale—robot that can get to and through places where people, and less-willies-inducing robots, can't maneuver.

Via Switched

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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