THE VIPER 10S - A SNAKE ROBOT

Snakes achieve a much higher degree of flexibility and adaptability to their immediate terrain than organisms that use limbs for locomotion while maintaining the same level of efficiency. Thus, building robots that can emulate the gaits displayed by snakes can enable us to access difficult-to-reach areas and harsh terrain with minimal power cost. This project aims to create a snake robot that emulates a few of the gaits that snakes use, namely lateral undulation and sidewinding locomotion in a modular, compact, low-power and relatively low-cost manner. As a result, the snake can manoeuvre over several slippery surfaces through the use of sidewinding locomotion, while maintaining high-speed travel using lateral undulation. Such a bot has a myriad of applications, including but not limited to search and rescue operations, stealth operations and wildlife research.