Design of a Novel Long-Reach Cable-Driven Hyper-Redundant Snake-like Manipulator for Inspection and Maintenance
, Alessandro Pistone 1,†, Daniele Ludovico 1,†, Paolo Guardiani 1,†, Roberto Gagliardi 1,†, Lorenzo De Mari Casareto Dal Verme 1,2, Giuseppe Sofia 1 and Darwin G. Caldwell 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The snake-like hyper-redundant manipulator is an interesting topic in robotics. This manuscript presents a prototype design of a long-reach cable-driven hyper-redundant robot. But from the academic contribution, this quality of this manuscript is very poor. Even as the authors claimed that they focus on the mechanical design and just intend to confirm the feasibility, the description is also very poor, not to mention the control and planning method of motions. Many basic issues as follows are not covered.
- From the design viewpoint, how to ensure, calculate and test the static and dynamic stiffness of the long-reach cable-driven hyper-redundant robot?
- What is the positioning errors (pose and position) of the actual system?
- How does the design ensure the structures enters spaces through apertures as small as 40cm × 40cm?
- How about the configuration (shape) holding ability?
- How to fold and unfold in/out from the parking box?
- What’s the meaning of the parameters listed in DH table, like qr1?
- How to determine the gear reduction ratio?
Author Response
The authors thank the Reviewer #1 for the job made on our draft. The suggestions, which are all reasonable
and well centred on the manuscript, helped us to remarkably improve the whole quality of the paper. A punctual
response is provided in the pdf file, and modifications are highlighted in the manuscript in red. We hope you
will find the revised version of the manuscript significantly improved.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The design of the snake robot presented in the article is very interesting, however there are some doubts about the scope of the information presented in the article:
- Is the research design appropriate?
The tests should be complemented with a wider range of tests presented in the paper, e.g. different trajectories, comparison of trajectory mapping at different loads on the robot tip and comparison with other similar designs.
- Are the results clearly presented?
Fig.13 - What is the frequency unit in this figure? Why are the values on the axis fractional?
Line 35. „The ability to withstand high temperatures and operate in hazardous environments or access places with small apertures is the key feature driving the design.”
The authors of the article mention the robot's ability to operate in high temperature environments but do not present any test results to confirm these assumptions. How is the control system protected from the effects of such a factor?
3. Are the conclusions supported by the results?
The authors in chapter 4 (Discussion) basically present information already contained in previous chapters. They mention simulation studies which they do not present in the paper at all and do not refer to their comparison with the achieved test results.
Author Response
The authors thank the Reviewer #2 for the job made on our draft. The suggestions, which are all reasonable
and well centred on the manuscript, helped us to remarkably improve the whole quality of the paper. A punctual
response is provided in the pdf file, and modifications are highlighted in the manuscript in blue. We hope you
will find the revised version of the manuscript significantly improved.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper presents the design of snake-like robot for inspection and maintenance. The paper focuses on the description of the designed solution. Many details are provided on the employed components and the mechanical layout. Few elements are also provided regarding the sensing and control hardware architecture.
This elements are certainly interesting and demonstrate a solid work behind the project.
However, it is not so clear how the control algorithm works and the experimentation is rather preliminary.
I would ask the authors to expand the second part of the paper providing more data on the control strategy. Please provide a wider description of the inverse kinematics algorithm and how the DoFs redundancy is planned to be managed according to the constraints provided by the restrictions to the working space. To this aim, I think a better description of the reported test case could be beneficial. The pseudo code in Algorithm 1 is not so clear, please add a description of the control logic in the text. Indeed, please report more data on the experimentation.
The state of the art should end with a critical review and the authors are asked to highlight the novelty of the proposed solutions against the ones being recalled.
The discussion section should not summarize what has been already described in the paper, but rather present a critical discussion of the reached results and future improvements.
Finally, the title of the paper is quite generic. I think it should be focused on the “design” of the mechanical/ electric hardware, as well software control, of the SLIM, which are the most relevant and significant contributions of the paper.
Author Response
The authors thank the Reviewer for the job made on our draft. The suggestions, which are all reasonable
and well centred on the manuscript, helped us to remarkably improve the whole quality of the paper. A punctual
response is provided in the pdf file, and modifications are highlighted in the manuscript in green We hope you
will find the revised version of the manuscript significantly improved.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors had understood the inadequacies of their manuscript and provided additional explanations. One more question, the authors called the presented arm as a snake-like robot. But it looks more like an elephant trunk-like robots. Perhaps, it's better to define the locomotion from the bionics.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank Reviewer #1 for the suggestions provided to improve the manuscript.
The authors agree with the Reviewer that the name of the robot could be misleading. For this reason, the authors changed the name of the device from "snake-like robot" to "snake-like manipulator" so that it is clearer that SLIM is not a mobile robot.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The revised version of the article presents much more clearly the discussed problem of a interesting manipulator. It is now much more interesting to the reader.
Editorial remarks:
Line 287 SLIM,to be used --> SLIM, to be used
Author Response
The authors would like to thank Reviewer #2 for the suggestions provided to improve the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have met the suggestions of the reviewers and I believe the paper has improved.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank Reviewer #3 for the suggestions provided to improve the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
