Serpentine Robot: An overview of Current Status & Prospect

Robots that mimic the natural motions of animals have long been of interest in science and engineering. The primary engineering interest in such robots is in having them conduct tasks that require complicated locomotion and cognition. Designating an outdoor mobile robot is more challenging work than the indoor mobile robot because it has the capability of operation at all weather condition and terrains. In case of Serpentine Robots it’s more difficult to control its motion and path. Crawling movement as a motive mode seen in nature of some animals such as snakes. Serpentine robots are slender, multi-segmented vehicles designed to provide greater mobility than conventional wheeled or tracked robots but speed is a limitation. Serpentine robots are thus ideally suited for urban search and rescue, military intelligence gathering, and for surveillance and inspection tasks in hazardous and hard-to-reach environments. Serpentine robots designed by inspiration from nature and snake’s crawling motion, is regarded as a crawling robots. The aim is to establish serpentine motions on a snake robot without appendages, limbs or wheels. Serpentine robots may be limbless or with limbs. Though various works have been done in this field, very few of them are based on a limbless system. It will be particularly challenging to simulate motion on a limbless system. The paper describes the different features of serpentine robots and summarizes the developments in the world. This paper is organized in the following manner: Interesting Biological aspects of snake is described in Section-1 which also includes its physical characteristics and associated research work in this direction. Locomotion studies and various types of locomotion are described in Section-2. Design aspects are discussed in Section-4. Section-5 is for discussion and conclusion.