I've missing something here.
Indeed you are missing something, as is the person who wrote the summary of the article for
Granted, it was the last line, so you really had to dig for that one, read the article next time.
Nature is a fantastic designer. Sure, she works slowly, but every project is subjected to years of testing and refinement. It’s no wonder then that we see engineers looking to nature for inspiration in robotics.
After reading this quote I was thinking the same thing, and also wondering what snake they looked at... Did it have a broken spine?
I have a 80" arboreal python and it moves nothing like that on the ground or climbing a vertical post. Snakes don't twist on the ground, and most (arboreal) snakes don't wrap around trees like that either, as it is an extremely inefficient method of motion for moving. Watching how a real arboreal snake climbs a tree would have yielded a much better climber of a robot. In my experience snakes use large bends in their bodies as hands or feet that they use to grip the sides of the object. They can release the bends muscle tension and moves up the post, squeezing again, and repeating the process downwards. It looks like an inchworm, but with the inching movement perpendicular to the direction of movement and opposed to congruent. That I would like to see on a robot, and it seems like it would also fit well with the attempts at modular design they are working with.
I understand some of the excitement about this thing, but as a snake owner I am not even close to impressed, even if it had frickin' laser eyes. This thing looks a worm after a rain, not the delicate beauty and raw strength of a snake. Whatever happened to all that hydraulic muscular research I read about years ago? This would have been the ideal application rather than a bunch of universal joints...
"An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of code." -- an anonymous programmer