Snake-arm inspection

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OCRobotics has just completed a contract for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which called for the company to build a snake-arm to be used on a remote vehicle.

OCRobotics has just completed a two-year contract for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which called for the company to build a 2.5m long snake-arm robot that could carry a 25kg payload and be used on a remote vehicle.

Where a rigid-link robot is restricted by the "elbows" in its arms, a snake-arm can follow its nose to reach through small gaps and around narrowly spaced obstacles. This makes it ideal for getting into awkward spaces.

The OCRobotics snake-arm robot that was developed is a bit like the human spine: it is comprised of a large number of vertebrae. The arm is ‘tendon’ driven with wires terminating at various points along its length. By controlling the length of each wire, the curvature and plane of curvature of each segment can be independently controlled. Software calculates the necessary lengths of all the wires to produce the desired shape.

The user can operate the robot in three modes: ‘joystick path following’, ‘cartesian tip motion’ and ‘joint mode’.

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