Meet DARPA's New Militarized Earthworm 83
derekmead writes "Meshworm is a toughened, robotic earthworm that can crawl virtually silently at a speed of about 5 millimeters per second. DARPA wants to send it into battle. Believe it or not, the Pentagon's been working on building a robotic earthworm for a while. They tried putting one together with gears. They tried with air-powered and pneumatic pumps, but the results were bulky and untenable. Then, researchers at Harvard, MIT and Seoul National University in Korea put their heads together and designed an 'artificial muscle.' It's essentially a polymer mesh that's wrapped with nickel and titanium wire designed to stretch and contract with heat. When an electric current is applied, the mesh mimics the circular muscle system of an earthworm to scoot forward."
BattleTech Myomer Muscle (Score:5, Informative)
This new "artificial muscle" sounds a lot like the Myomer muscles from the BattleTech franchise except that I believed they worked on magnetics instead of heat and they weren't supposed to be invented until 2350.
"DARPA wants to send it into battle" (Score:5, Informative)
The unanswered question, though, is - to do what, exactly?