Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that require traversing a wide range of surface roughnesses and topologies. Previous locomotion strategies, involving wheels or ambulatory motion, such as snake platforms, have success on specific surfaces but fail in others which could be detrimental in exploration and navigation missions. In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines snake-like robots with an Archimedean screw locomotion mechanism to provide multiple, effective mobility strategies in a large range of environments, including those that are difficult to traverse for wheeled and ambulatory robots. This work develops a robotic system called ARCSnake to demonstrate this locomotion principle and tested it in a variety of different terrains and environments in order to prove its controllable, multi-domain, navigation capabilities. These tests show a wide breadth of scenarios that ARCSnake can handle, hence demonstrating its ability to traverse through extreme terrains.

翻译：在诸如洞穴、海洋和行星体等极端环境中探索和航行往往对人类来说太危险,因此机器人是可能的代孕者。这些机器人面临巨大的移动挑战,需要穿越广泛的地表粗糙和地形。以前的移动战略,涉及轮子或移动运动,例如蛇的平台,在特定的表面取得成功,但在其他可能损害探索和航行任务的地表上却失败。在本文件中,我们提出了一个新颖的方法,将蛇状机器人与一个Archimedean螺旋桨移动机制结合起来,在广泛的环境中提供多种有效的移动战略,包括难以旋转和移动机器人的移动战略。这项工作开发了一个称为ARCSnake的机器人系统,以展示这种移动原则,并在不同的地形和环境中测试,以证明它具有可控性、多面的导航能力。这些测试显示了ARCSnake能够处理的多种情况,从而表明它能够穿越极端地形进行移动的能力。