Snake Robot With Rectilinear Motion

In a recent post, we showed a snake robot used in search and rescue operations.  The snakes that inspired that design paradigm used lateral undulation motion.  Georgia Tech has also been working on snake-inspired rescue robots, but they've come up with a new form of robotic locomotion based on a trick that some snakes have been using for years, called rectilinear movement.

Rectilinear locomotion is when a snake moves by lifting up the scales on its belly, moving them forward, and then putting them back down on the ground again and pulling the rest of its body along, turning itself into a sort of traveling wave of muscle. Since the snake doesn't have to undulate its entire body, it's an efficient (albeit slow) form of locomotion that's especially adaptable to high-angle surfaces with varying friction, and to narrow crevices without much room to maneuver. It might also be required to climb slopes of varying inclines.

Another benefit of rectilinear motion for the robot is efficiency.   Existing robots can do many of these things, but the majority require large amounts of energy and are prone to overheating. Georgia Tech researchers have designed a new machine by studying the locomotion of a certain type of flexible, efficient animal.

“By using their scales to control frictional properties, snakes are able to move large distances while exerting very little energy,” said Hamid Marvi, a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech.While studying and videotaping the movements of 20 different species at Zoo Atlanta, Marvi developed Scalybot 2, a robot that replicates rectilinear locomotion of snakes.

Georgia Tech