Snake robots can be built in all shapes and sizes, from the three meters long water powered hydraulic fire fighting models developed by a company called Sintef, to a medical version developed at Carnegie Mellon University that is thin enough to maneuver around inside the human body. Though snakebots can vary greatly in size and design, there are two qualities that all snakebots share. First, their small cross section to length ratio allows them to move into, and maneuver through, tight spaces. Second, they possess kinematic redundancy, that is the have multiple degrees of freedom of motion that allows them to perform a wide range of useful behaviours.
This so called hyperredundancy comes from constructing the robot by chaining together a number of independent modules. The design also makes them resistant to failure, because they can continue to operate even if parts of their body are destroyed. In theory this would also permit the robot to be assembled to any arbitrary length as the task warrants or in advanced designs, allowing the device to split into one or more independent units once entry had been made.
Different types of snakes have different ways of moving through their environments, including side-winding, slithering and inch-worming. Snakebots will be able to perform all of those movements. They will also be able to coil and flip over in order to climb up and over obstacles. So far, the test versions of the snakebot have been remote controlled but work is in progress to make them relatively autonomous. This has emerged as a bottle-neck due to the fact that kinematic modeling techniques by in large have had to be designed from the ground up. Because these robots are not anthropomorphic, control poses some interesting programming problems.
These robots are most useful in environments where their unique characteristics give them an advantage. These environments tend to be long and thin like pipes or highly cluttered like rubble. Furthermore, when a task requires a number of different obstacles to be overcome, their locomotive flexibility gives them great advantage. For example, if a robot is required to carry a camera to the top of a tree that is growing in water it has to do three things: move over ground to the water's edge, swim to the tree, and then climb the tree. A robot could be built that does any one of those three very well, but being able to do all three, and many other difficult combinations, is what makes snake robots exceptional.
To find out more:
Anna Konda, the robotic firefighter
Carnegie Mellon University Snake Robots site
Modular Serpentine Robots
Modular Reconfigurable Robotics
Bookmark this story with del.icio.us
Digg this story
Furl this item
Have you Reddit?