CMU Researchers Contribute to NASA’s Autonomous Robot Snake

Carnegie Mellon University researchers teamed up with scientists at NASA to develop a robot capable of searching underwater oceans on distant planets for signs of life. NASA’s Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) is a self-propelled, autonomous, snake-like robot inspired by a desire to one day look for signs of life in the vast ocean beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s Enceladus moon. Science Robotics featured EELS on the cover of its March 2024 issue and published a paper about the project. EELS was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with collaboration from CMU, Arizona State University and the University of California, San Diego. CMU researchers developed the controllers for the robot and an early prototype used modules developed by HEBI Robotics, a university spinout that Choset founded in 2014.