OC Robotics has developed a snake-arm robot that is only 12.5mm in diameter. The arm is the smallest snake-arm robot to date and uncoils out of a briefcase-sized box where it is stowed.

The arm is 610mm in length, with longer arms under development, and was designed for the US Department of Defense who needed a way of inspecting and working inside confined or cluttered spaces.

Snake-arm robots are flexible robotic arms that don’t have ‘elbows’, so they can ‘follow their nose’ into confined spaces. Conventional industrial robots are virtually impossible to manoeuvre in cluttered environments because their elbows get in the way, says OC.

At the other end of the scale endoscopes are very flexible but are also floppy and it can be difficult to make them go where you want them to, especially if the path is particularly complex. A snake-arm robot is somewhere in between the two. Snake-arm robots are flexible and compliant, like endoscopes, but they are fully controllable like a robot and can be precisely positioned.

With a snake-arm robot the operator needs only to drive the tip of the arm around obstacles using a tip-mounted camera and the software will control the rest of the arm to follow where the tip has been. This makes controlling these devices simple and easy to learn. A snake-arm robot is effectively a controllable endoscope which can snake into awkward or cluttered environments to conduct real work.