Modular Snake Robot with Mapping and Navigation: Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Robot

This paper focuses on the design of a hyper redundant snake robot inspired from a real biological snake. Snakes have unique capabilities for moving on a wide range of terrain. The snake robot, rather than wheeled and legged mobile mechanisms, offers high stability. The paper presents a design of a snake robot that possesses the ability to map and navigate in its surroundings and also to find the possibility of human life. The snake robot is designed using sensors such as Ultrasonic sensors, PIR sensor and is designed to a moderate size segments so that easy locomotion is possible. The most effective movement pattern, flexible locomotion gaits such as side winding, crawling, plunging and leaping can be implemented on a snake robot. The snake robot can be used for many applications such as search and rescue operations in collapsed structure and inspection of tightly packed space that people and conventional machinery cannot access. To make the snake robot work or function like a real biological snake, it is constructed using many joints that enables the robot to have various degrees of bends, and gives the robot ability to be flexible enough to reach or approach different terrains. This ability of snake robot enables it to move around in complex environments.