Students at Virginia Tech have built a trio of pole-climbing serpentine robots designed to replace construction workers tasked with dangerous jobs, such as inspecting high-rises or underwater bridge piers.
The autonomous robots can climb scaffolding and buildings by wrapping around a pole or beam and then rolling upward via an oscillating joint motion. Using built-in sensors and cameras, the robots then inspect the structures or handle other dangerous tasks, said Dennis Hong, director of Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa).
RoMeLa students built the HyDRAS-Ascent (Hyper-redundant Discrete Robotic Articulated Serpentine for climbing), the HyDRAS-Ascent II and CIRCA (Climbing Inspection Robot with Compressed Air) robots.
The robots are about three feet long and use movements unique even in nature.
“These are really wicked cool robots,” he added. “Unlike inchworm type gaits often being developed for serpentine robot locomotion, this novel climbing gait requires the serpentine robot to wrap around the structure in a helical shape, and twist its whole body to climb or descend by rolling up or down the structure,” explained Hong.
The HyDRAS robots operate using electric motors, while the CIRCA robot uses a compressed air muscle.
For now, they operate by a tethered wire attached to a laptop, but Hong and his students are reconfiguring the robots to function independently using an onboard microprocessor and power source.
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