Hyper-redundant robot mechanisms and their applications

Hyper-redundant robots have a large or infinite number of degrees of freedom. Such robots are analogous to snakes or tentacles and are useful for operation in highly constrained environments and novel forms of locomotion. The paper reviews newly developed methods for the kinematic analysis of hyper-redundant manipulators. These methods can be applied to a wide variety of hyper-redundant morphologies and lead to very efficient inverse kinematic, path planning, obstacle avoidance, locomotion, and grasping schemes. It also reviews the design and implementation of a planar 30 degree of freedom variable geometry truss hyper-redundant robot.