The mechanical design of snake-arm robot

Snake-arm robots with a slender and flexible body have many potential applications in aerospace, nuclear and surgery industry. In this paper, we presented a snake-arm robot. This robot has three hollow slender segments composed of ball-joints driven by steel cables. A cage-like structure is contrived to drive the steel cables, and a special motor-driven control system is proposed for the control of this robot. A kinematics model has been built with a new moving decomposition method which significantly simplifies the transformation matrix. In the end, the prototype of this robot is performed, and the design of this robot is proved to be feasible by experimental results that have been shown in this paper.