Welcome To The Squiggly World Of OmniTread
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 4 of January , 2010 at 1:38 am
Okay, so this is not exactly your first introduction to the squiggly world of snakebots, but I liked the introduction to this particular robot, which is called OmniTread. It’s called OmniTread because, as you may have guessed, it is utterly betreadified, with treads on pretty much every available surface. OmniTread is made up of a series of independent square-ish segments (I think a three dimensional rectangle is technically called a “prism”) connected by three pressurized tubes, the rigidity of which can be independently adjusted to control the angle between OmniTread’s segments to a useful degree.
There are two version of OmniTread: one that can fit through an 8 inch hole that weighs 26 pounds, and a smaller bot that can fit through a 4 inch hole and only weighs 5.5 pounds, including on board power systems. The small robot also has the capability to “latch on and travel along small diameter objects such as water pipes, electric overhead wires, or on-wall electric conduits.” Developed by the University of Michigan, OmniTread is designed for rescue and inspection duties where humans either can’t go or really don’t want to go.
This is not a new robot, with the 8 inch diameter version from 2005 and the 4 inch diameter version from 2007 or 2008. Now it’s 2010, which means that even if these snakebots only followed a linear development path (and exponential is much more likely), we’d be looking at a half pound snakebot that can fit through two inch holes and probably feeds on kittens or something for power. Or maybe the project was concluded. I’m not sure. But if you see one, run very far away, and then let me know.
[ OmniTread ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]
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Category: Research
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