Two types of snake-like robots for complex environment exploration: Design, development, and experiment

Abstract

A snake-like robot has flexible mobility and high stability with low center of mass. It is very useful for complex environment exploration. This article develops two types of snake-like robots with different structure, shape, and modular joints. One (named as HITSZ-Snakebot I) is composed of 10 single degree-of-freedom modular joints, and the other (called HITSZ-Snakebot II) comprised eight 2-degree-of-freedom modular spherical-shape joints. The joints of the two types of robots are arranged as the same layout, that is, ''Yaw-Pitch-Yaw-Pitch-....'' The difference lies that, for the former, each rotation axes (''Yaw'' or ''Pitch'') is designed as one modularized unit, while for the latter, two adjacent rotation axes (''Yaw'' and ''Pitch'') are designed as one modularized unit. The exterior frame of each 2-degrees-of-freedom joint is designed as a spherical structure, which is connected with the motor through two-stage reduction mechanism. Therefore, the drive torques are largely increased. Many small passive wheels are mounted along a circle of the exterior surface. Such design largely decreases the friction between the robot and the road, and it also has the effect of compensating gravity when the space simulation is applied. At last, two types of prototypes are developed and experimented. The results show that the developed robots have high mobility and flexibility.

The snake-inspired robots: a review

“…In China, inspired by the ACM series of snake-inspired robots, Dr Sun Hong, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, proposed a new pitch-roll (P-R) joint structure design and developed a climbing snake-inspired robot (CSR), which not only could move flexibly in three-dimensional space but also implemented the function of climbing trees (Shao et al , 2015). As snake-inspired robots are of great advantage in exploration tasks on unknown and complex planetary surfaces, Harbin Institute of Technology has developed HITSZ-Snake I (Wang et al , 2016) and HITSZ-Snake II (Mu et al , 2017). These two types of snake robots are of different modular structures and joint forms, which exhibit good stability and flexibility in motion.…”

A Survey on Snake Robot Locomotion

“…The first was a design approach for sensing environment contact forces based on the measured joint constraint. The second design approach allowed the cylindrical surface of each snake segment to rotate by an embedded motor to generate the forward propulsive forces on the robot from its environments [120].…”

Diseño de una articulación de dos grados de libertad para robots modulares

“…Esta distribución se asemeja a los robots de tipo serpiente, donde la clave de sus movimientos está en el diseño de la articulación. En [7] se hace una revisión de diversas configuraciones para las articulaciones de este tipo de robots, que junto con el trabajo presentado en [11] y [5], han servido de referencia para esta propuesta.…”