Howie Choset, Robot-Snake Charmer

Howie Choset, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, has spent years creating mechanical snakes with names such as Uncle Sam, Betsy Ross, Pepperoni, and Monster Max that can climb up poles, swim across ponds, and burrow into tight places. The reptilian bots have as many as 75 specially constructed joints with tiny motors, and some borrow movements, like sidewinding, from desert snakes and other living creatures. Now Choset, 44, is working on versions that could be used in search and rescue after earthquakes and that slither along pipes at power plants to detect cracks and leaks that could cause accidents.

“He is pushing his robots to operate in environments robots traditionally couldn’t work in—sand, debris, rubble,” says Daniel Goldman, a physics and biology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who collaborates with Choset on using mathematical models to better understand how snakes and the sandfish lizard move.