MIRRAX: A Reconfigurable Robot for Limited Access Environments
Wei Cheah, Keir Groves, Horatio Martin, Harriet Peel, Simon Watson,, Ognjen Marjanovic, Barry Lennox

TL;DR
MIRRAX is a reconfigurable robot designed for inspection in extreme, cluttered, and restricted environments, capable of self-adjusting to navigate narrow gaps and complex terrains, demonstrated through experimental validation and deployment at a nuclear site.
Contribution
This paper introduces MIRRAX, a novel reconfigurable robot with controllability analysis and practical deployment in a nuclear facility for remote inspection.
Findings
Minimum footprint width for stable configuration is 0.19 m.
Reconfigurable to access ports as small as 150 mm diameter.
Successfully deployed for remote inspection at a nuclear site.
Abstract
The development of mobile robot platforms for inspection has gained traction in recent years with the rapid advancement in hardware and software. However, conventional mobile robots are unable to address the challenge of operating in extreme environments where the robot is required to traverse narrow gaps in highly cluttered areas with restricted access. This paper presents MIRRAX, a robot that has been designed to meet these challenges with the capability of re-configuring itself to both access restricted environments through narrow ports and navigate through tightly spaced obstacles. Controllers for the robot are detailed, along with an analysis on the controllability of the robot given the use of Mecanum wheels in a variable configuration. Characterisation on the robot's performance identified suitable configurations for operating in narrow environments. The minimum lateral footprint…
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Taxonomy
TopicsModular Robots and Swarm Intelligence · Robotics and Automated Systems · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
