Design of a compliant environmentally interactive snake-like manipulator

Abstract

Hyper redundant manipulators are robotic arms with many degrees of freedom. This allows them to navigate through a changing environment filled with objects. In this paper a new design for a hyper redundant manipulator is proposed. It makes use of underactuation and compliance to solve two problems, the path planning of the manipulator and the friction in the system. The proposed design consists of five segments. Each segment is a compliant cross axis flexure joint with four flexures. The proposed design is compared with a hyper redundant manipulator that also includes underactuation but is not compliant. It was found that compliance increases the range of motion and decreases the bending stiffness of the total manipulator while decreasing the lateral stiffness.