Design and Sensor-Based Control for Hyper-Redundant Mechanisms

摘要

Toxic materials in DOE sites pose a significant threat to DOE personnel who must inspect these locations. Working in confined spaces further complicates the situation especially when the workers must wear heavy and cumbersome protective suits. A robot or conventional mechanism can clearly bypass the danger and perhaps expedite the characterization process because the person is removed from the site and neither the site nor the person require preparation. However, conventional robots are not suitable for these inspection tasks because they are not flexible enough to pass through and into target DOE inspection sites. This effort is developing an articulated probe, called a hyper redundant mechanism, which is a snake-like device that can exploit its many internal degrees of freedom to thread through tightly packed volumes transmitting images and data from remote locations inaccessible to conventional robots and people. This effort contains two parts: mechanism development and control of the device.