Joint-repositionable Inner-wireless Planar Snake Robot
career value
183K/year
🤖 AI Summary
Conventional multi-joint serpentine robots suffer from excessive weight (>5 kg), high power consumption (hundreds of watts), complex cabling, and poor terrain adaptability—largely due to reliance on dozens of discrete motors. To address these limitations, this work proposes a planar serpentine robot featuring dynamically reconfigurable joints and integrated flexible wireless power transfer. Our approach combines a rack-and-pinion-based joint displacement mechanism with a soft, wireless-charging epidermis, enabling in-body dynamic relocation of actuation units and cable-free energy delivery. Coupled with passively compliant inter-joint linkages, this architecture substantially reduces structural mass and power demand. The prototype achieves a total mass of only 1.3 kg and an operational power consumption of merely 7.6 W, while increasing bending curvature by 40%, enhancing kinematic degrees of freedom, and eliminating wiring complexity entirely. This work establishes a novel paradigm for lightweight, energy-efficient, and highly adaptive soft-bodied robotics.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Bio-inspired multi-joint snake robots offer the advantages of terrain adaptability due to their limbless structure and high flexibility. However, a series of dozens of motor units in typical multiple-joint snake robots results in a heavy body structure and hundreds of watts of high power consumption. This paper presents a joint-repositionable, inner-wireless snake robot that enables multi-joint-like locomotion using a low-powered underactuated mechanism. The snake robot, consisting of a series of flexible passive links, can dynamically change its joint coupling configuration by repositioning motor-driven joint units along rack gears inside the robot. Additionally, a soft robot skin wirelessly powers the internal joint units, avoiding the risk of wire tangling and disconnection caused by the movable joint units. The combination of the joint-repositionable mechanism and the wireless-charging-enabled soft skin achieves a high degree of bending, along with a lightweight structure of 1.3 kg and energy-efficient wireless power transmission of 7.6 watts.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Reduces heavy structure and high power in snake robots.
Enables flexible, low-powered multi-joint-like locomotion.
Prevents wire tangling with wireless power transmission.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Joint-repositionable mechanism for dynamic configuration
Wireless power transmission via soft robot skin
Low-powered underactuated multi-joint locomotion
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