[YouTube Link]

What do you get when you cross a snake with a robot? Howie Choset and the rest of the wily geniuses at Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created snakebots that can move by sidewinding, corkscrewing, rolling … and as you can see in the video clip, can also climb up your leg (yikes!)

All of us at Neatorama would like to be the first to welcome our new robot snake overlord: Link – via Suicide Bots

Previously on Neatorama: Snakebot and other robotic snakes

(Evil mad?) Scientists at the Hirose Fukushima lab in Japan have created our next robotic overlord: the ACM-R5 snakebot that can slither on land and swim gracefully in the water:

The control system of ACM-R5 is an advanced one. Each joint unit has CPU, battery, motors, so they can operate independently. Through communication lines each unit exchanges signals and automatically recognizes its number from the head, and how many units join the system. Thanks to this system operators can remove, add, and exchange units freely and they can operate ACM-R5 flexibly according to situations.

GeekAlerts has the video: Link (awesome!) | Hirose Fukushima Lab website

Go on, watch this swimming snakebot and try to convince yourself after the first few seconds that what you’re watching is just a machine.

What makes this thing particularly amazing is that it can move just as smoothly over land as it can in liquid. I can easily imagine this ‘bot lurking beneath the glacial sheets of Dione or Tethys, or slithering across the vast trackless wasteland of Mars…or for that matter, curving its way sinuously across the ice in Antarctica on a more terrestrial science mission. Either way, it has to be the most fascinating robotic innovation I’ve seen in a very long time!