A Serpentine Robot Based on 3 DOF Coupled-driven Joint

This paper presents a novel joint design for serpentine robot. It has three degrees of freedom and can make the serpentine robot move in extremely difficult environments, such as the rubble of a collapsed structure in earthquake. The leading feature of this serpentine robot is that the novel designed joints based on coupled-driven mechanism was employed, providing more powerful torque under the same condition, and therefore allowing the serpentine robot to perform all kinds of locomotion effectively in three dimensional space. Moreover, the coupled-driven mechanism and the rear actuator performing roll action make the serpentine robot perform multiplex complex locomotion, which improve its flexibility and capability of traversing rugged terrain