Study on the 3D shape of active cord mechanism

Snake-like robots and hyper-redundant manipulators have been called active cord mechanism (ACM), and they have been one of fields of robotics. However, general study on the spatial shape of ACM has not been conducted enough so far. In this paper, we propose a effective method for analysis of the 3D shape of ideal continuous ACM models. In addition, we show some important characteristics of ACM using this method. The results help us understand the characteristics and possibility of ACM