Snails have an unusual way of walking, which has been recreated in robots.
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Equipped with one large foot, the mucus-evacuation robot can effectively imitate the way snails crawl across surfaces, even steep ones.
“I always say that snails are like Michael Jackson to me. I don’t know how they move, but somehow the gliding is happening.” Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu at the University of Southern Denmark Presentation at the March General Meeting of the American Physical Society on March 4 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Fascinated by the shelled mollusk, Saravana and colleagues decided to build a large, soft, single-legged version of the snail and use it as the basis for a robot that moves like a snail.
Saravana explained in his presentation that the team chose to make the legs out of a soft material that could be partially inflated with a small pneumatic pump. Although the chemistry of snail mucus has been studied in detail, the way the snail’s legs move has only been hypothesized based on biologists’ observations, he says. These past studies propose that different parts of the snail’s foot impact the ground and leave the ground before impacting the ground again, and that their movements are not synchronized with each other. This creates a wave pattern across the foot, causing the snail to glide forward on the mucus.
Researchers have successfully reproduced this “pedal wave” motion, which can also expel mucus, in an experimental robot, allowing it to move forward and change direction without falling over. Saravana said that in some experiments, the robot was able to climb steep slopes.
Snail robot without shell
Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu/University of Southern Denmark
Although the bot is still in the experimental stage, Saravana hopes it will be the first robot ever to propel itself like a snail. To make it more self-contained, the team is experimenting with placing the pump inside a snail-like shell on top of the robot. A slightly larger plastic replica of a real snail’s shell, the shell contains electronics to remotely control the robot and emits mucus under the robot’s feet to mimic the slimy tracks of a real snail. It can also accommodate a syringe system for use.
But the team’s ultimate goal is to make the robot’s inflatable legs even softer, making it more like a real snail, whose body is mostly made of water. The researchers hope that a robot that successfully navigates on mucus could eventually inform the design of soft medical robots that can navigate inside the mucus-rich human body.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
