RoboSnail

Posted 3 Jul 2003 at 21:44 UTC by The Swirling Brain

Washington Times says that MIT has built the first robotic snail that can crawl across slime. The RoboSnail robot is about 10 inches long and was made to study locomotion with microfluidics. Apparently, as the volume of fluids gets smaller they behave differently, an example would be capillary action of water getting sucked up through a tube or a rain drop sticking to a window. Using these microfluidic properties with a viscous fluid in conjunction with a rubbery membrane driven by motors and gears allows the Robosnail to gyrate and cause forward motion. A very slick method of locomotion, wouldn't you say?