Abstract
This paper presents the concept of muscle-driven locomotion for planar snake robots, which combines the advantages of both rigid and soft robotic approaches to enhance the performance of snake robot locomotion. For this purpose, two adjacent links are connected by a pair of pneumatic artificial muscles wherein an alternate actuation of these soft actuators causes a rotational motion at the connecting joints. The muscle-based actuated linkage mechanism, as a closed six-linkage mechanism, was designed and prototyped. The linear motion and force generation of the pneumatic artificial muscle was experimentally characterized using isotonic and isometric contraction experiments. A predictive model was developed based on the experimental data to describe the relationship between the force–length–pressure of the PAMs. Additionally, the muscle-driven mechanism was kinematically and dynamically characterized based on both theoretical and experimental studies. The experimental data generally agreed with our model’s results and the generated joint angle and torque were comparable to the current snake-like robots. A skx-link planar snake robot with five joints, five pairs of antagonistic muscles, and an associated pneumatic controller was prototyped and examined for simple movements on a straight-line. We demonstrated the muscle-driven locomotion of the six-link snake robot, and the results show the feasibility of using the proposed mechanism for future explorations of snake robot locomotion.
Highlights
Locomotion of Snake-Robots.The demand to develop autonomous robots with the ability to adapt and operate in unstructured and unknown environments has recently emerged, with the potential for a variety of applications, such as space exploration, search-and-rescue, and agriculture
Muscle-based actuation has been investigated in recent works in the field of computer graphics and physic-based simulation, inspired by the musculoskeletal biomechanics of vertebrate animals, to simulate the locomotion of 3D bipedal characters and imaginary creatures [39,40,41]. These works studied the control and optimization of these muscle-actuator and their routs/the locations of connections along the structure of these characters and creatures to achieve the optimal gait and velocity for a stable locomotion. Inspired by these works and the musculoskeletal system of biological snakes, this paper presents the concept of muscle-driven locomotion for planar snake robots’ locomotion, which combines the advantages of both rigid and soft robotic approaches to enhance the performance of snake robots
We demonstrated the muscle-driven locomotion of the six-link snake robot and the results show the feasibility of using the mechanism in future explorations of snake robot locomotion
Summary
Locomotion of Snake-Robots.The demand to develop autonomous robots with the ability to adapt and operate in unstructured and unknown environments has recently emerged, with the potential for a variety of applications, such as space exploration, search-and-rescue, and agriculture. Snake-like robots have been studied over the last 50 years and their effective locomotion in confined, narrow, and irregular environments has been demonstrated [2] These robots consist of a serial kinematic chain of rigid-links connected through joints capable of bending in one or more planes that provide many degrees of freedom, which are suitable for the creation of complex motions [2]. These advantages make them suitable for use in applications in unstructured, unknown, and dynamic environments. Recent snake robots were given more complex joints for obstacle-aided locomotion on uneven and cluttered environments (Kulko [5]), as well as for climbing trees and pipes (Uncle Sam [6], OmniTread OT-4 [7])
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