CMU talk: Snake Robots and Stuff that Makes them Go

Speaker: Howie Choset, Associate Professor, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Date: Thursday, November 10

Snake robots, formally called hyper-redundant mechanisms, are highly articulated devices that can use their many internal degrees of freedom to thread through tightly packed volumes accessing locations that people and machinery otherwise cannot. Moreover, the internal degrees of freedom of hyper-redundant mechanisms give them the ability to achieve different forms of mobility, including crawling, climbing and swimming.

The many degrees of freedom that furnish these robots with their benefits, also provide their greatest challenges: mechanism design, control, systems integration and power. This talk discusses my group's work in addressing these challenges and overviews future work. Also, this summarizes some of the applications for snake robots that my group is active; these applications include urban search and rescue, minimally invasive sugery, inspection of wings, and site characterization of buried tanks.