Abstract
Continuum robots with redundant degrees of freedom and postactuated devices are suitable for application in aerospace, nuclear facilities, and other narrow and multiobstacle special environments. The development of a snake-inspired continuum robot is presented in this study. The morphological skeleton structure of the snake body is simulated using underactuated continuum joints, which include several rigid-body joints in series. Each rigid-body joint is driven by the traction of a wire rope. Based on the layered-drive principle, angular synchronous motion can be realized in space with multiple rigid-body joints in a single continuous joint, which can considerably reduce the complexity of the inverse kinematics solution, terminal drive box, and control system. The static and dynamic characteristics of the snake-inspired robot are obtained through torque balance and an equivalent transformation. Finally, we demonstrate trajectory planning and load capacity testing in two robot prototypes with arm lengths of 1500 and 2300 mm (including two and four continuous joints, respectively). The rationality of the structure and the correctness of the control of the layered-drive snake-inspired robot are verified.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
