The OmniTread OT-4 serpentine robot

Abstract

Serpentine robots are slender, multi-segmented vehicles designed to provide greater mobility than conventional wheeled or tracked robots. Serpentine robots are thus ideally suited for urban search and rescue, mine rescue, military intelligence gathering, and for surveillance and inspection tasks in hazardous and hard-to-reach environments. One such serpentine robot, developed at the University of Michigan, is the "OmniTread OT-4" [Borenstein et al., 2007]. The OT-4, shown in Figure 1, can climb over obstacles that are much higher than the robot itself, propel itself inside pipes of different diameters, and traverse even the most difficult terrain, such as rocks or the rubble of a collapsed structure.