"I looked up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming slowly across the hole. One of its gripping limbs curled amid the debris; another limb appeared, feeling its way over the fallen beams. I stood petrified, staring. Then I saw through a sort of glass plate near the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of tentacle came feeling slowly through the hole. I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at the scullery door. The tentacle was now some way, two yards or more, in the room, and twisting and turning, with queer sudden movements, this way and that." (H.G. Wells "The war of the worlds").

What we read in SF literature may be largely bypassed by snake-arm robots developed by OCRobotics and KUKA Roboter, able to go to places they had never been before, so far used for assembly and inspection tasks within aircraft wings, an area previously inaccessible to automation.

OCRobotics has tested a demonstration snake-arm robot capable of sealing, swaging and inspection inside a mock-up of a rib bay. The aerospace industry has been slow in using robotics on assembly lines; operations within rib bays and other confined spaces inside aircraft structures have remained practically impossible, until the new inventions.

This is mainly due to the high accuracy needed over large structures. Recently, there has been a general tendency towards automation in order to increase throughput and standardize processes. The new robots do not have prominent "elbows", but a continuous curving shape, like a snake. This means that they are ideal for applications in confined spaces and can reach lots of awkward places.

The OCRobotics snake-arm robot is attached to the KUKA (a global supplier of industrial robots) industrial robot. The aerospace robots should be capable of inspection, swaging and sealing. Initial tests show the arm is flexible enough to deliver the required tools to areas of the wing box that were previously inaccessible to automation.

The snake-arm robot is equipped with a wrist and tool interface where a variety of different tools designed by OC Robotics can be attached. In the future, the OC Robotics Extender range of snake-arms could equip every industrial robot with a fit snake-arm extension to reach into confined spaces.

Photo credit: OC Robotics