Snake Bot

Project Status: Complete April 2008

My idea is a robotic snake arm. This is a totally different design of robotic arm. The standard robotic arm is a set of rigid segments with joints at either end, with a snake arm it is made up of self contained segments that can move. This segmented design makes it very flexible and it can reach places other robotic arms can’t i.e. look around corners or follow the contours of its path.

The idea is not new, there are a good number of other professional organisations working on snake robots including, NASA and Carnegie Melon University in the USA. If you do a search for “snakebot” or “Snake robot” on Google you will find them all. However I was not a professional and did not have the resources that they probably had. That did not deter me as a really wanted to have a go at making my own version of a snake robot. So for my project I took the angle of making the cheapest solution but with maximum functionality. So after dithering about for the first month of the academic year I began on this project.

Videos (the red dome was a funny idea at the time!)

Documentation

This is a pdf version of my full A-Level project folder on SnakeBot. You will find information from start to finish on this project. PDF Approx 6MB