Pole Climbing Snake Robot Can Also Crawl Up Your Arm

 Robotics

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have added a new climbing model to their array of snake robots, or hyper redundant robots as they call them.  In a new video posted online, the newest robot snake climbs up poles automatically and even makes its way up a researcher's arm.

The team at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotic Institute has been designing and testing snake robots for some time now.  As the name suggests, these robots possess multiple actuated joints thus mulitple degrees of freedom. This gives them superior ability to flex, reach, and approach a huge volume in its workspace with infinte number of configurations. The redundance in configurations gives them the technical name: hyper redundant robots.

The video clip below demonstrates recent work to develop compliant controllers for CMU's lab's snake robots. These controllers allow the robot to automatically adapt its shape to changes in its environment. Until now most of our motions, including pole climbing, have been remote-controlled.

In this video the robot autonomously climbs a 4" pole, transitions to a 2" pole, and then to an arm, demonstrating that the controller is able to adapt to different diameters of objects without exerting too much force for to be uncomfortable in human contact.



SOURCE  Crazy Engineers

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