Reversing evolution, science was able to help snakes 'grow more legs'

Snakes are animals that appeared from the Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago. They are thought to have evolved from burrowing or aquatic lizards, over time they have evolved to "abandon" four legs and form a small, covered body that pushes scales to be able to slide. On the ground. This fact prompted producer and YouTuber Allen Pan to do something to reverse this evolution and give them legs to move around.

Inspired by several types of prosthetics built for disabled cats and dogs, Pan started with a ready-made solution that incorporates a pair of robotic exoskeletons that act like a crab to attach to two snake head. However, the lack of a supporting structure in the middle could have resulted in some injury to the animal, so this prototype was soon abandoned.

Both the front and rear pairs of pins are connected by a flat connector.

To overcome these problems, Pan designed a set of four pins in Tinkercad that each consisted of two segments. Both the front and rear pairs of legs are connected by a flat connector, and contain a servo motor on each side for side-to-side movement, along with a cutout in the middle for attaching a transparent solid sleeve. . 

The robot itself consists of 4 legs, each with 3 joints and two servos. The foot joint rotates freely to handle any uneven terrain.

There will be eight servo motors in total, powered by a set of LiPo batteries. They are also connected to a dedicated servo control board via the host computer and controlled wirelessly. Since snakes are descended from lizards, Pan carefully observed how the lizards moved to mimic the gait of these prosthetics. 

The robot's gait was inspired by lizards Allen observed in a pet store. The main body of the robot is a transparent plastic tube.

Robot is inspired by snakes

In addition, the movement of snakes is also taken as an inspiration to build robots for scientists. This animal moves quickly through unstructured environments and avoids obstacles by going around or over them, or through small holes in obstacles, such as a pile of rocks. For years, engineers have studied snakes' superior mobility to create snake-like robots that can move in similar ways.

Snake robots or Snakebots are especially valuable in search and rescue operations. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from snake robots a few meters long operating on the ocean floor to extremely tiny snakes built for medical purposes.

Traditional snakebots move using the same movements as real snakes. But for now, with the next-generation Snakebots, they will have a modular design, consisting of a series of independent modules connected and programmed to work together. This allows them to continue working even if some modules are destroyed.

New advances in actuators, motion planning algorithms, force feedback and modularity are taking snake robots to a certain level of complexity and higher functionality.

If manufacturers use materials that have frictional properties similar to scales on snake skin, robots can perform slithering snake-like movements and robot makers do not have to install extra wheels to resist. the phenomenon of sliding to the sides. Thus, this finding could help design robots that simulate snake movements operating in tight spaces.

Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is considered by many to be the home of snake robot design and development. CMU engineers have made advances in force-sensing technology so a robot can determine how tight it needs to wrap around an object in order to grip — eliminating the need to pre-program the robot based the "best guess" conditions of its operating environment.

"Almost any animal you can imagine is used as an inspiration for a robot," said Aaron Johnson, a roboticist and professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. That's because animals - humans included - are good at doing what robot builders want their machines to be able to do, like picking up things, jumping or moving over rubble."

"Rather than trying to accurately mimic an animal's mechanism and behavior, we try to understand the principles of how an animal successfully does what it does and apply that to a system," says Johnson. new robotic system".

These robots have a modular design, where segments or modules can be added or removed to change the length of the robot. Each module is a series elastic actuator fitted with sensors that allow controllable position, velocity and torque control, as well as three-axis inertia measurement.