The OmniTread OT‐4 serpentine robot—design and performance

Borenstein, J.; Hansen, Michael K.; Borrell, Adam

doi:10.1002/rob.20196

Cited by 98 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In these environments contact can occur anywhere, and robots that have propulsion surfaces only on the bottom are always at risk of being stalled due to excessive, non-propelling contact. In our paper 13 we compute the propulsion ratio for the OT-4, where P r = 0.51 and for the OT-8 we found P r = 0.4.…”

Section: Wireless Controlmentioning

confidence: 94%

OmniTread OT-4 serpentine robot: new features and experiments

Hansen

2007

SPIE Proceedings

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Serpentine robots are slender, multi-segmented vehicles designed to provide greater mobility than conventional wheeled or tracked robots. Serpentine robots are thus ideally suited for urban search and rescue, military intelligence gathering, and for surveillance and inspection tasks in hazardous and hard-to-reach environments. One such serpentine robot, developed at the University of Michigan, is the "OmniTread OT-4." The OT-4 comprises seven segments, which are linked to each other by 2-degree-of-freedom joints. The OT-4 can climb over obstacles that are much higher than the robot itself, propel itself inside pipes of different diameters, and traverse even the most difficult terrain, such as rocks or the rubble of a collapsed structure.The foremost and unique design characteristic of the OT-4 is the use of pneumatic bellows to actuate the joints. These bellows allow simultaneous control of position and stiffness for each joint. Controllable stiffness is of crucial importance in serpentine robots, which require stiff joints to cross gaps and compliant joints to conform to rough terrain for effective propulsion. Another unique feature of the OmniTread design is the maximal coverage of all four sides with driven tracks. This design makes the robot indifferent to roll-overs, which are happen frequently when the slender bodies of serpentine robots travel over rugged terrain. This paper describes the OmniTread concept as well as its latest technical features, and an extensive Experiment Results Section documents the abilities of the OT-4.

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Section: Wireless Controlmentioning

confidence: 94%

OmniTread OT-4 serpentine robot: new features and experiments

Hansen

2007

SPIE Proceedings

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“…Some, such as McIsaac and Ostrowski's anguilliform (eel-like) robot [20] and Hirose's ACM-R5 [14], have been sealed for underwater operation. A few others, including Borenstein's OmniTread [21] and recent iterations of our Modsnakes [4,22], have been hardened for use in the dirty environments characteristic to realistic search-andrescue scenarios.…”

Section: B Snake Robots: Mechanisms and Gaitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Snakes on a plan: Toward combining planning and control

Hatton

Knepper

Choset

et al. 2013

2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

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Highly articulated robot locomotion systems, such as snake robots, present special motion planning challenges. They possess many degrees of freedom, and therefore are modeled by a high dimensional configuration space which must be searched to plan a path. Kinematic and dynamic constraints further complicate the selection of effective controls. Finally, snake robots often have multiple modes of interaction with the terrain as contacts are made and broken, leading to complex and imperfect motion models. We believe that the space of useful controls that provides desirable motions, however, is much smaller. Useful net motions for such systems are often generated via gaits, or cyclic motions in the shape space. Gaits transform a high-dimensional continuum search into a relatively tractable discrete search. In this paper, we put forward a framework which allows a planner to generate paths in a low dimensional work space and select among gaits, preplanned motions in the robot's shape space. The contribution of this paper rests on the "virtual chassis" which is a choice of body frame for the snake robot that allows the planner to efficiently select among and plan with gaits to direct the robot along the work space path. We demonstrate this planner running on a simulated snake robot navigating through a variety of clutter scenarios. The virtual chassis also has the benefit of allowing us to generalize notions of controllability to gait motions.

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“…A related study on a snake-like robot, the 'Modular snake robot' [5] realizes various motion of snakes, especially tree climbing, and 'OT-4' [6] demonstrates excellent mobility on rough terrain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of snake-like robot ACM-R8 with large and mono-tread wheel

2015

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One of the important advantages of an active wheeled snake-like robots is that it can access narrow spaces which are inaccessible to other types of robot (such as crawlers, walking robots), since snake-like robots have an elongated, narrow body. Additionally, in areas with rubble, snake-like robots can traverse rough terrain and large obstacles since its body can conform to the terrain's contours. 'ACM-R8' is a new snake-like robot which can climb stairs and reach doorknobs in addition to the features explained above. To fulfill these functions, the design of this robot incorporates several key features: joints with parallel link mechanism, mono-tread wheels with internal structure, force sensors and 'swing-grousers' which were developed to improve step climbability. In this paper, the design and control methods are described. Experiments confirmed high mobility on stairs and steps, with the robot succeeding in overcoming a step height of 600 mm, despite the height of the robot being just 300 mm.

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The OmniTread OT‐4 serpentine robot—design and performance

Cited by 98 publications

References 17 publications

OmniTread OT-4 serpentine robot: new features and experiments

OmniTread OT-4 serpentine robot: new features and experiments

Snakes on a plan: Toward combining planning and control

Development of snake-like robot ACM-R8 with large and mono-tread wheel

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