A Novel Architecture for Modular Snake Robots

We have designed a snake robot, a hyper-redundant serial linkage of many actuators, that uses a modular architecture. Our design considers size, power, weight, and trade-offs among these criteria. We chose a modular architecture to allow a single joint design to simply be repeated to achieve the sixteen degrees-of-freedom (DOF) the robot normally consists of. At the core of the module is the “Super Servo 2,” a modified hobby servo, with custom electronics for sensors to monitor current and temperature, a communications bus, and a programmable microcontroller. This combination of the mechanical and electrical architectures results in a robust and versatile robot that is capable of a wide variety of tasks from swimming to climbing flag poles. In this paper we discuss the trade-offs considered in the design, the mechanical and electrical architecture, and the reliability of the modules.