This Robot Inspired By Snakes Will Make Your Skin Crawl

This odd robot has been developed at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences also known as SEAS for short. The researchers from SEAS stated that the robot was inspired by snakes and was made using Japanese papercraft technique called kirigami.

For those who do not know what kirigami is, to put it simply, kirigami is a variation of origami which is achieved through a process of folding and cutting the paper. This new conception was an improvement base on the first variation that was made of a flat sheet of kirigami.

This particular robot was designed with a 3D-texture surface that has the ability to grip the ground similar to that of a real snakeskin. The new robot is also equipped with a programmable shell which helps improving its accuracy and speed.

This new research brought about the ability to control two features of the material including the sheet's curvature and the cut's size. And a combination between these two properties will help the researchers developing a program to control the localized pop-ups.

This research results in this particular robot that behaves similarly as a snake. The researchers are now moving on to develop an inverse model for more sophisticated deformations. The research can be found in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.