Being long and skinny and wiggly is a strategy that’s been wildly successful for animals, ever since there have been animals, more or less. Roboticists, eternally jealous of biology, have taken notice of this, and have spent decades trying to build robotic versions of snakes, salamanders, worms, and more. There’s been some success, of a sort, although most of the robotic snakes and whatnot that we’ve seen have been for things like disaster relief, which is kind of just what you do when you have a robot with a novel movement strategy but without any other obvious practical application.
Dan Goldman at Georgia Tech has been working on bioinspired robotic locomotion for as long as anyone, and as it turns out, that’s exactly the amount of time that it takes to develop a long and skinny and wiggly robot with a viable commercial use case. Goldman has a new Atlanta-based startup called Ground Control Robotics (GCR) that’s bringing what are essentially giant robotic arthropods to agricultural crop management.
