Researchers over at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have successfully come up with a new robot that will feature half a dozen legs, and it looks pretty much like an arachnid (although spiders have eight legs) in the manner that it walks – and will sport the name “Snake Monster”. I would have preferred it to be known as a prototype for a mechanical Facehugger though, but that is just my imagination going wild. The Snake Monster was developed to be an easily reconfigurable platform via a modular system architecture which allows it to be programmed easily so that it can govern robots using a varied array of configurations.
Taking approximately half a dozen months to design and create, Snake Monster could very well stake its claim in the annals of robot history by being a precursor to a range of robots that were meant to be built via a modular system. There is still work being done on it, as well as on other modules within the lab that will include force-sensing feet, wheels and tank-style treads so that users have the flexibility to modify the base structure into a collection of radically different robots – where each of them will have their own range of tasks to attend to.