Implementation of Integrating a Scan-matching based SLAM into a Snake-like Robot

Abstract

Robot Operating System (ROS) is currently the most trending and popular robotic framework in the world, reaching critical mass and being the closest one to become the standard that the robotics community urgently needed. Snake-like robots are capable of different locomotion patterns to move in narrow spaces, even with uneven terrain or highly constrained environments such as tunnels or pipes. In a rescue mission after a disaster, a snake-like robot needs Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to determine the robot’s posture in an unknown environment. In SLAM, robots incrementally build a consistent map of the environment while simultaneously determining its position and orientation within this map. An implementation of integrating a scan-matching based SLAM into a snake-like robot is proposed using ROS. Experiments show the validity of the method.