And you can almost hear it cracking up. “Yeh, bub, I’ll climb a tree next week. Right after I finish vacuuming the floor. See, I just randomly walk around until I’ve hit the whole thing at least once. Mister, this may take me three times as long as it would take a human, but I take a real short coffee break.”

Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech is trying to change all that. He’s bothered by the fact that so many robots depend on wheels. In nature, rolling takes a back seat (sorry!) to climbing, swimming, slithering and crawling. So why don’t robots climb, slither or crawl? One of Hong’s many inventions is the snake robot, designed to climb bridges and look for cracks. We can’t begin to imagine what all else this robot could do. It may be inspired by a snake, but it sure looks like something the military could put to use … Dress it up with a cobra skin, and you can almost imagine this gizmo sneaking a microphone into a terrorist camp in the desert.

And did you hear that Hong is working on robot that moves like an ameba? Perfect for crawling into a collapsed building, he says… For details, you’ll have to check our book. Or check more details on Hong.

Robot Snake!!

David J. Tenenbaum is co-author of The Why Files: The Science Behind the News.