Robotic ‘EELS’ Ready For Tunnel Warfare
3/14/2023
By Laura Heckmann
NASA/JPL-CalTech illustration
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — A snake-like robot may provide the military with technology that could alter the nature of tunnel warfare.
Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor — or EELS — is a mobile exploration tool designed to scout extreme terrain unreachable by most ground robots. EELS is designed to traverse water, sand, rock and ice, said Masahiro Ono, principal investigator for the EELS project, located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
While the robot was conceived to explore extraterrestrial worlds, the military could find it useful because “you never know what the environments are” or “what kind of mobility is optimal,” Ono said on the sidelines of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum in National Harbor, Maryland.
It’s designed for terrain inaccessible by tracked or wheeled ground robots, he added.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/3/14/robotic-eels-ready-for-tunnel-warfare
