The US Department of Defense was looking for a robot that could inspect small, cluttered spaces. But the problem with most conventional industrial robots was that their “elbows” got in the way, allowing them to bend only at certain places. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, endoscopes were flexible enough but too floppy to be precisely positioned.

Now, a UK company called OC Robotics has developed a small snake-arm robot that is flexible like an endoscope but controllable like a conventional robotic arm. Instead of joints or elbows, the snake-arm robot has vertebrae, allowing it to be precisely positioned, even inside confined spaces. Each segment (half an inch in diameter) can be independently controlled by a human operator with a joystick and a software system, maneuvering the robot in tight quarters with a tool or camera on the tip of the arm.

“With a snake-arm robot, the operator needs only to drive the tip of the arm around obstacles using a tip-mounted camera, and the software will control the rest of the arm to follow where the tip has been,” the company said in a release. “This makes controlling these devices simple and easy to learn. A snake-arm robot is effectively a controllable endoscope which can snake into awkward or cluttered environments to conduct real work.”

Power to the robot can be supplied from an external or internal battery, or an electricity line. When not in use, the two-foot-long snake-arm coils up inside a briefcase-sized box that weighs just 10 kg.

OC Robotics plans to make longer versions in the future. The company predicts that the snake-arm robots will have several applications, such as in aerospace assembly, nuclear inspection, and medical surgery. OC Robotics is currently taking order for the snake-arm robots.