In a recent video, YouTuber and engineer Allen Pan announced that he had built a set of robotic legs to enable snakes to walk.
Since its initial upload, the video has amassed several million views.
Snakes have been unable to walk for roughly 150 million years.
In the video, Pan constructs an initial set of legs, which he expresses to the camera that he cannot attach to a real snake. He then visits a pet shop with a reptile section to get a better idea of how reptiles use their legs.
“They don’t really walk like mammals do,” said Pan in the video. “With visual data I was able to reconstruct how a snake might walk if it still had legs.”
From his observations, Pan constructed a second machine, a tube with a set of four legs attached, to better suit a snake’s body. He then visited a snake breeder to test the prototype on a live animal.
After some hesitancy, a snake is seen entering the tube and ‘walking’ around, with its movements controlled by Pan.
