Technology

Elements

The arm

The arm itself is flexible, continuously curved and has many degrees of freedom. In most cases the arm will have a continuous diameter which makes the arm easy to seal against liquids or contamination.

All arms have a hollow bore down the centre which can be used to take services to the tip of the arm or to turn the arm into a steerable hosepipe or vacuum cleaner.

Arms can be interchangeable for different tasks or planned maintenance, or if they are designed to be low cost, the arms might be considered to be disposable or 'sacrificial'.

The actuator pack

At the base of the arm, the actuator pack is a modular drive system that uses electric motors and actuators to control the length of the drive wires. All actuators are the same to reduce complexity and cost of ownership.

Tools

Your application might require new tools specifically designed to work in confined spaces. Our work in this area is described under tools and in the aerospace and nuclear case studies.

Operating modes

A snake-arm robot can be tele-operated or programmed offline. The robot can be controlled in three different modes:

Path-following: using a joystick and tip-mounted cameras to follow a path with the whole device following the tip.
Cartesian motion: moving the tip in tool or world coordinates whilst continuing to avoid obstacles.
Joint mode: moving individual joints or segments.

There is more information on snake-arm operating modes under user operation.

Research

OC Robotics has an ongoing programme of research and development. We recently won a £900,000 grant from the DTI Technology Programme to fund a project entitled "Snake Skin".

More information

Please contact us if you would like us to send you more details about our snake-arm robots.