This Week In Bots: Snakes, Barks, Vacuums, Sex Movies, And Other Mechanical Surprises (fastcompany)
**The Dog-Bark Snake Bot**
You’ve probably heard of robot snakes before, useful in search-and-rescue
scenarios because they can worm their way into confined spaces–perhaps in
collapsed buildings–that other machines can’t match. You may also know SAR
teams sometimes use sniffer dogs to help them locate victims trapped in
rubble. But you’ve probably never conflated these two notions, and pictured a
SAR dog that has a slave snake-bot that it can deploy and control with a bark.
That’s what a project with input from Canaday’s Ryerson University and
Carnegie Mellon University has come up with. They call it the Canine Assisted
Robot Deployment system.
[youtube 1p9L9lGgztE]
Initially designed as a simple supply-drop device, so that the sniffer dog can
drop a care package near any victim it finds with a bark command, the team
realized that a cleverer system would let the dog get as close as it can to a
potential target, and then drop the robot at the site so that a remote human
operator can then search in more cramped spaces the dog can’t reach. It may be
a potent future option for rescue teams–assuming the funding can be found to
develop the idea further.
**The …