ARCSnake: Reconfigurable Snakelike Robot With Archimedean Screw Propulsion for Multidomain Mobility

Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that require traversing a wide range of surface roughnesses and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on robotics 2022-04, Vol.38 (2), p.797-809
Main Authors: Richter, Florian, Gavrilov, Peter V., Lam, Hoi Man, Degani, Amir, Yip, Michael C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biologically inspired robots
biomimetics
Caves
Extreme environments
Fasteners
field robots
Kinematics
Locomotion
mechanism design
Mobile robots
Navigation
Oceans
Propulsion
Robot dynamics
Robots
Skin
Topology
Wheels
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that require traversing a wide range of surface roughnesses and topologies. Previous locomotion strategies, involving wheels or ambulatory motion, such as snake platforms, have success on specific surfaces but fail in others, which could be detrimental in exploration and navigation missions. In this article, we present a novel approach that combines snakelike robots with an Archimedean screw locomotion mechanism to provide multiple, effective mobility strategies in a large range of environments, including those that are difficult to traverse for wheeled and ambulatory robots. This work develops a robotic system called ARCSnake to demonstrate this locomotion principle and tested it in a variety of different terrains and environments in order to prove its controllable, multidomain, navigation capabilities. These tests show a wide breadth of scenarios that ARCSnake can handle, hence demonstrating its ability to traverse through extreme terrains.
ISSN:1552-3098
1941-0468
DOI:10.1109/TRO.2021.3104968