02-11-2010, 12:23 PM
Study on the Mechanism and Locomotion Strategy
for New Snake-Like Robot Active Cord Mechanism
This paper presents ACM-S1 (Active Cord Mechanism
- Slime model 1), a snake-like robot. Conventional
snake-like robots have difficulty negotiation uneven
ground. In this paper, we propose “a bending
and expanding joint unit” which has three degrees
of freedom (3DOF) in inchworm/angleworm-like
motion and has been developed to solve this problem.
The ACM-S1 we developed is composed of a series
of these joint units. Experiments conducted to
evaluate ACM-S1’s performance demonstrate the effectiveness
of inchworm motion over uneven ground
Introduction
Robot use has been increasing since the introduction of robots use at various industries. Many scientists and engineers have made excellent studies on many types of robots. However, it is also true that demands for new types of robots are still present. Rescue and inspection applications alone call for a robot able to negotiate such difficultto- reach sites as sewage lines, water mains, and swamps. The Hirose Laboratory at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which studied many types of robots, has proposed slender, flexible snake like robots to meet such needs. Snake-like robots have been widely studied by many researchers. Professor Hirose and colleagues designed the robot, which became as the world’s first snake like robot (Fig. 1) that succeeded to demonstrate the serpentine locomotion in 1972 named Active Cord Mechanism (ACM). This is a functional body having a cord shape that actively bends like a snake [1]. Since then, several researchers have studied snake-like robots for motion mainly on ground. Miller (2005) designed the real-istic snake-like-robots named S1–S7. Also professor Hirose has developed many types of snake-like robots [2– 6]. Studies on amphibious or in-water snake-like robots are less common than for on-ground. Professor Hirose and colleagues developed an amphibious snake-like robot named ACM-R5 (Fig. 2) [7]. Crespi and colleagues, who have researched the neurobiological hypotheses about the structure of neural networks controlling locomotion in fishes and snakes, developed an amphibious snake robot named Amphibot [8].
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