Washington: Researchers have apparently taken inspiration from legless slithering reptiles- snakes- to design a brand new Mars exploration robot.
Aksel Transeth, a senior scientist from Norway`s SINTEF Research Institute, along with his colleagues, is carrying out a feasibility study for the European Space Agency, to see how a snake robot would fare on the red planet, ABC News reported.
Transeth told the publication that the study is more like a written report than a series of experiments, however, the ideas on paper could make their way into a prototype within a few months.
Howie Choset, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, said that there are many places that current rovers can`t reach, but the snake robot could travel to cliffs and look underneath overhangs.
Choset asserted that the new model could find a crevasse, crawl down it and extract a sample, which itself could tell us how Mars evolved as a planet.
ANI
