Development of a 3D Snake-like Robot: Perambulator-II

Snake-like robots exhibited more advantages than conventional mobile robots on environment adaptation. They almost can move in most ill conditions including rough terrain, desert, water, cave and tree. In this paper, a 3D snake-like robot called Perambulator-II (Shenyang Institute of Automation snake-like robot II) is developed with the acquirement of powerful propulsion and high mobility. The unit of snake-like robot Perambulator-II robot named as modular universal unit (MUU) is introduced, which behaves three DOFs with a series of passive rollers around its cylinder body. Also, some considerations on mechanism design of snake-like robots are presented. And the shell shape of 3D snake-like robot according to mobility is discussed in detail. The locomotion of Perambulator-II is presented for test its performance. The experimental results are given to validate the mobility of the snake-like robot Perambulator-II.