CONCERTINA LOCOMOTION OF A SNAKE ROBOT IN THE PIPE

Abstract

Urgency of the research. Nowadays robotics and mechatronics come to be mainstream. With development in these areas also grow computing fastidiousness. Since there is significant focus on numerical modeling and algorithmization in kinematic and dynamic modeling. Inspection of the pipes is well-known engineering application. For this application are usually used wheel-based robots. Another approaches are based on biologically inspired mechanisms like inchworm robot. Our study deals with another kind of pipe inspection robot, namely snake robot. Target setting. Modeling and testing of snake robot moving in the pipe for the inspection purposes. Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. Pipe inspection is usually done by wheel-based robots. However, snake robots have great potential to do these applications. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. Inspection in section of curved pipes is still the actual point of research. The research objective. In the paper the locomotion pattern of namely snake robot is designed and experimentally verified. The statement of basic materials. This paper investigates the area of numerical modeling in software MATLAB. The paper presents locomotion pattern of snake robot moving in the narrow pipe. Next, kinematic model for robot is derived and motion of robot simulated in the software MATLAB. Subsequently the experiments are done with experimental snake robot LocoSnake. In the conclusion the simulation and experiment results are compared and discussed. Conclusions. The paper introduces concertina locomotion pattern of namely snake robot with numerical modeling as well as experimental verification. The results of experiment are different from simulation mainly because of differences of kinematic configuration between simulation and real model. The experiment also shows uniqueness of kinematic configuration using revolute as well as prismatic joints, what is for concertina locomotion significant.