Kinematics and statics analysis of a novel cable-driven snake arm robot

Due to the great performance in complex and narrow spaces, snake-like robots, especially snake arm robots, have gained increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, a novel cable-driven snake arm robot is proposed. For greater flexibility, the snake arm not only has multiple two-degree-of-freedom joints, but also has telescopic modules that have one degree of freedom. The kinematics and statics analysis of n-module arm is performed. In kinematics analysis, the joint angles are used as an intermediate variables between the final pose and the cable lengths. And in order to get cable tension, the static equilibrium equations are used. At last, the simulation and results of a snake arm with two modules is given.