Snails have an uncommon method of strolling that has now been replicated in a robotZuzha/Shutterstock
A mucus-excreting robotic with a single giant foot can successfully imitate the best way snails crawl over surfaces – even steeply inclined ones.
“I at all times say that snails are like Michael Jackson to me. You don’t see how they transfer, however one way or the other gliding is going on,” stated Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu on the College of Southern Denmark throughout a presentation on the American Bodily Society’s March Assembly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 4 March.
Fascinated by the shelled molluscs, Saravana and his colleagues determined to construct a model of a snail’s single giant, smooth foot and use it as the premise of a robotic that strikes like a snail.

Throughout his presentation, Saravana defined that the group selected to construct the foot from a smooth materials that might be inflated in segments by small pneumatic pumps. He says that whereas the chemical properties of snail mucus have beforehand been studied intimately, the best way the snail’s foot strikes had solely been hypothesised primarily based on biologists’ observations. These previous research proposed that totally different components of a snail’s foot hit the bottom, then detach from it earlier than hitting it once more, and so they achieve this out of sync with one another. This creates a wave kind throughout the foot that lets the snail glide ahead on its mucus.
The researchers replicated this “pedal wave” movement of their experimental robotic, which might additionally excrete mucus, and noticed it efficiently transfer ahead and make turns with out falling over. It even managed to maneuver up steeply inclined surfaces in some experiments, says Saravana.
The snail robotic with out its shellSaravana Prashanth Murali Babu/College of Southern Denmark
Though the bot remains to be on the experimental stage, Saravana hopes that it’ll develop into the primary ever robotic that propels itself like a snail. To make it extra self-contained, the group is experimenting with placing the pumps in a snail-like shell on high of the robotic. The shell – a barely outsized plastic reproduction of an actual snail shell – may also home electronics for remotely controlling the robotic, and a syringe system for releasing mucus beneath the robotic foot, mimicking an actual snail’s slimy path.
The group’s ultimate purpose, nevertheless, is to make the robotic’s inflatable foot even softer and extra much like actual snails, whose our bodies are principally product of water. The researchers hope {that a} robotic that efficiently strikes on mucus might inform the design of soppy medical robots that would finally transfer contained in the human physique the place mucus can be ample.

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