  Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and
planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are
possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion
challenges that require traversing a wide range of surface roughnesses and
topologies. Previous locomotion strategies, involving wheels or ambulatory
motion, such as snake platforms, have success on specific surfaces but fail in
others which could be detrimental in exploration and navigation missions. In
this paper, we present a novel approach that combines snake-like robots with an
Archimedean screw locomotion mechanism to provide multiple, effective mobility
strategies in a large range of environments, including those that are difficult
to traverse for wheeled and ambulatory robots. This work develops a robotic
system called ARCSnake to demonstrate this locomotion principle and tested it
in a variety of different terrains and environments in order to prove its
controllable, multi-domain, navigation capabilities. These tests show a wide
breadth of scenarios that ARCSnake can handle, hence demonstrating its ability
to traverse through extreme terrains.
