This Robotic Centipede Crawls Farms to Kill Weeds — and Might Join the Military

This Robotic Centipede Crawls Farms to Kill Weeds — and Might Join the Military Just keep them far away from us. Creepy Robo Crawlers Engineers have developed a giant robotic centipede that can scuttle across farmland to root out weeds. As IEEE Spectrum reports, Georgia Tech spinoff Ground Control Robotics has created a bio-inspired centipede that uses sensors and plenty of motor-actuated limbs to control weeds. "Centipede robots, like snake robots, are basically swimmers," founder Dan Goldman told IEEE Spectrum. "We created a new kind of mechanism to take actuation away from the centerline of the robot to the sides, using cables back and forth," he added. "When you tune things properly, the robot goes from being stiff to unidirectionally compliant. And if you do that, what you find is almost like magic — this thing swims through arbitrarily complex environments with no brain power." Never Too Many Legs The unnerving contraption was designed for fields with difficult terrain, w ... Read full article.