Design and architecture of the unified modular snake robot

Abstract

The design of a hyper-redundant serial-linkage snake robot is the focus of this paper. The snake, which consists of many fully enclosed actuators, incorporates a modular architecture. In our design, which we call the Unified Snake, we consider size, weight, power, and speed tradeoffs. Each module includes a motor and gear train, an SMA wire actuated bistable brake, custom electronics featuring several different sensors, and a custom intermodule connector. In addition to describing the Unified Snake modules, we also discuss the specialized head and tail modules on the robot and the software that coordinates the motion.