An Approach To Enable Both Locomotion And Manipulation In A Snake-inspired Robot

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In contrast with many wheeled and legged robots, however, most snake-like robots cannot pick up and manipulate objects. This significantly limits their real-world applications , as it prevents them from completing tasks that entail more advanced interactions with their surroundings.

A research team at Northeastern University's Silicon Synapse Lab supervised by Prof. Alireza Ramezani recently introduced a new approach that could allow snake-like robots to move and manipulate objects simultaneously. This approach, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv , was initially implemented on COBRA, a robotic platform developed by a group of students at Northeastern as part of the BIG Idea Competitions.

"We've been developing the snake robot COBRA for almost three years," Adarsh Salagame, Ph.D. student at Northeastern University, told Tech Xplore. "This project started out as a means of exploring alternative locomotion capabilities.

By successfully allowing the COBRA robot to morph into different shapes, Salagame and his colleagues were able to broaden its locomotion skills, demonstrating five different types of locomotion styles. Subsequently, they also started exploring the possibility of enhancing the robot's object manipulation skills.

"To make the COBRA robot even more functional and versatile, expanding its applications to areas beyond those tackled by traditional robots, we came upon this idea of object loco-manipulation, which entails locomotion and manipulation together," Salagame said. "That's what we achieved with COBRA."

The COBRA robot has a gripper mechanism integrated in its head, which is designed to assist the robot during a specific locomotion mode, known as tumbling. While the robot is tumbling, its head and tail latch together to form a wheel-like structure, thus allowing it to passively roll down a slope at high speeds.

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