Pentagon prepares army of robot worms

In an attempt to create the armed forces products of the future, the Pentagon has gone back to nature. Alongside a dog-like robot to carry a soldier's heavy equipment into the battlefield, they have also developed a tiny reconnaissance plane that emulates a hummingbird and another device that mimics a cheetah and can hit speeds of almost 20 miles an hour.

KitGuru wonders what on earth the worms have to do with war.
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When things are heated, in general, they expand. Likewise, when they are cooled, they contract. Physics 101 ends there.

Now imagine that the material being heated and contracted is a thin nickel-titanium wire, wrapped like a spring around the central ‘body' of an intrusion robot, created from a special polymer mesh. Get the heating and cooling right – then you can create a muscle-like action. Effectively, the tube like robot has 5 sections and passing the right current along each section, in order, gives it a worm-like drive system.

That's what MIT has succeeded in doing for the US military: Creating a worm-like robot with the ability to burrow and make its way toward a reconnaissance target.

Depending on the density of the material that the worm-bot needs to drill through, it can move at up to 18 meters an hour. That would be enough to go into the ground, under a wall, and arrive up the other side in a sensible time frame.

When presenting the worm-bot, the US military were keen to point out its durability and the fact that it can be trodden on or hit with a hammer – and still continue to operate. Which must bring up the possibility of these robots being deployed by air – dropped in volume over an enemy's territory – to send back vital information.

KitGuru says: If you consider how vicious and effective nature has been – through all the various species on the planet – it's only natural that weapon scientists would ‘look to mama' for the next way of killing people.

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