Serpentine — A rescue snake robot

Nowadays robotics has grown beyond leaps in almost all every aspect of life and the most important fields are rescue/search and medical field. Every year a number of people are losing their life because of natural calamities such as earthquakes and mine accidents. Often, many are trapped in the `debris'. Our idea is to provide a robot (called serpentine) which can easily penetrate through the small gaps in debris and to track the people trapped inside and rescue them. Serpentine resembles the motion of the snake and is highly flexible to navigate through the available path in the debris. Basically, our serpentine has two modes of operation: In the first mode, it moves autonomously like a snake. This has been achieved through software. In the second mode, it just moves according to our instructions and this is handled via remote control. In each mode, a camera on the head of serpentine continuously provides the visual information to outside world through which we can track the trapped people and rescue them.