Snake Robot Gripper Module for Search and Rescue in Narrow Spaces
Sangchul Han, Sang Uk Chon, Jungyeong Kim, Jaehong Seo, Dong Gwan Shin, Sangshin Park, Jin Tak Kim, Jinhyeon Kim
Abstract
This letter presents a gripper module for a snake-like robot to perform search and rescue tasks in a narrow space. The proposed gripper module has three features: (1) It can accommodate the fingers inside its body. (2) It has three fingers that can grip objects with irregular surfaces stably. (3) One of the fingers is equipped with a camera on the fingertip to search in a narrow space. To implement the above features in a small, light, and compact gripper module, we propose a novel design of a gripper module with three fingers and eight degrees of freedom. The joint configuration of the proposed gripper is unique compared with a general-type gripper. A prototype of the proposed gripper module has been integrated into a snake-like robot to demonstrate its capability of performing rescue tasks in a collapsed environment. The three features of the proposed gripper module are experimentally verified: it is light (0.4 kg), small (less than 68 mm in diameter), and powerful (grasping force = 2.48kgf).
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2022_snakerobotgrippe,
title = {Snake Robot Gripper Module for Search and Rescue in Narrow Spaces},
author = {Sangchul Han and Sang Uk Chon and Jungyeong Kim and Jaehong Seo and Dong Gwan Shin and Sangshin Park and Jin Tak Kim and Jinhyeon Kim and Maolin Jin and Jungsan Cho},
booktitle = {RA-L 2022},
year = {2022}
}